F1 | Whiting amazed by the controversy over the latest safety car in China: "Our goal is not to favor some drivers"

The arrival of the safety car during the last Chinese Grand Prix sparked quite a bit of controversy among drivers and professionals. At the end of the race, in fact, Sebastian Vettel criticized the race conduct of Charlie Whiting, who would have sent the good Maylander onto the track in a period of time that did not allow the first two (in this case Bottas and, indeed, Vettel .ed) to make your pit stop. This move favored the Red Bulls, with Verstappen and Ricciardo who were able to fit new soft compounds which, looking at the final classification, influenced the final result of the GP.

In an interview with Autosprint, Whiting defended his actions, justifying the timing in China as “safety for all workers involved in that sector of the track”. The race director waited until all the cars were far from the hairpin bend (the point where the two Toro Rossos made contact. Ed.), so as to allow the workers to carry out a safe and risk-free intervention.

Whiting said he was surprised by this controversy, given that the safety car operates completely independently and does not aim to mix the cards during the running of a Formula One Grand Prix.

Here are the words of Charlie Whiting: “If we decide to use the safety car it is for safety reasons, so at that moment I'm not looking to see if there are those who will have an advantage and those who won't. We just waited until there was a certain gap in traffic on the track. The debris was scattered over a large area, so I wanted to wait until all the cars were behind the safety car before sending the marshals out onto the track. I wanted to make sure there was enough space between one passage and another to give the marshals time to do their job."

“It's a bit of a mystery to me why all this came up.”, he added. “We have had the VSC since 2015 and the SC for twenty years, we should have understood that with every intervention there will be winners and losers. But if we had to sit down and figure out who would benefit and who wouldn't, and what that decision would entail, then there wouldn't be time to do that and that's not our job anyway."