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The big news of the day is the fallout from the McLaren-Trulli affair in Australia.

On Friday morning, McLaren sporting director Davey Ryan was sent home by team boss Martin Whitmarsh for his role in misleading the stewards at the Australian Grand Prix last weekend.  Ryan has been with McLaren since the seventies but it looks like his exit from the team will be permanent.

Ryan is taking the fall because for some reason as he and Hamilton walked to the stewards office after the race Ryan told Hamilton to withhold the fact that the team had told Lewis to let Jarno Trulli through in the final safety car session of the race.  Lewis was clearly uncomfortable with doing this but wanted to follow the senior team member’s instructions and went along with it.

Later on Friday a clearly emotional Hamilton apologised in front of the world’s media, saying:

As soon as I got out of the car I did the TV interviews at the back of the garage and straight away I gave a good account of what happened during the race.

Straight after that we were requested by the stewards, and whilst waiting for the stewards I was instructed – and misled – by my team manager to withhold information, and that’s what I did.

I sincerely apologise to the stewards for wasting their time and for making them look silly.

I’m very, very sorry for the situation – for my team, for Dave, who’s been a good member of the team for many years and whilst I don’t think it was his intention…he’s a good guy.

When I went into the meeting I had no intention of… I just wanted to tell the story, say what happened.

I was misled and that’s the way it went.

Some might say that Davey is a scapegoat and Hamilton has got away lightly.  But I do believe that Lewis was just trying to go along with what his team wanted out of a sense of loyalty.  In the days that followed Lewis obviously regretted what he’d done and I think the following statement goes some way to explaining how it happened:

As a human being and as a man it’s right for me to stand in front of you and put my hands up. I want to say sorry to all my fans. I am not a liar or a dishonest person; I am a team player.   If the team ask me to do something, I generally do it – but I felt awkward and uncomfortable. This is not an easy thing to do, to step back and realise I was in the wrong – but I was in the wrong. I was misled. I don’t know what else is going to happen in the future.

I still think it could have all been avoided if race control could have provided guidance to the drivers and teams at the time.  Neither Lewis nor Trulli did anything wrong on the track and if the race organisers had sorted out the proper race order at the time instead of handing Trulli a ridiculous 25 second penalty none of this would have had to happen.

But with all the controversy we shouldn’t forget there is still a race on Sunday and in Friday practice the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen topped the timesheet despite Kimi suffering a problem with KERS and a fire in the cockpit.

Red Bull and Williams looked quite strong again but it seems Brawn GP won’t necessarily have it all their own way on Sunday.  Rubens Barrichello will take a five place grid penalty for changing a gearbox.

Other teams like Toyota and BWM concentrated on setup rather than lap times so they may do better in qualifying than their Friday times would suggest.

Here are the times from the first two practice sessions:

First Practice

Second Practice

The FIA have released a summary of key considerations in their decision to disqualify Lewis Hamilton from Sunday’s Australian Formula One Grand Prix.  The press release also includes recordings of the radio transmissions between Lewis Hamilton and the McLaren team in the closing stages of the 2009 Australian Grand Prix.

There has been a lot of confusion about what exactly happened on Sunday, but here is the rough order of events.

1. During the final safety car period Jarno Trulli was in 3rd and Lewis Hamilton was in 4th.
2. Jarno Trulli ran off the track (probably because of cold tyres) and so Hamilton had no choice but to pass him.  This is allowed under the rules.
3. McLaren weren’t sure if Lewis should have made the pass under the safety car and so they asked him to let Trulli take 3rd position back.
4. Hamilton seemed to think the pass was legal but slowed to let Trulli through anyway.
5. Trulli sees Hamilton slow down and thinks he has a problem so he passes the McLaren.  This is allowed under the rules.
6. The race ends with Trulli in 3rd and Hamilton in 4th.
7. During a hearing after the race Lewis Hamilton and his team manager David Ryan are asked whether McLaren told Hamilton to let Trulli through.  They denied this was the case.
8. Trulli is handed a 25 second penalty for passing under the safety car and so Hamilton is awarded 3rd place.

There were two reasons a second hearing was held in Malaysia.  Firstly, after the Australian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton told reporters that McLaren had in fact told him to let Trulli through and secondly, it seems the stewards did not listen to any of the radio transmissions before making their decision to penalise Trulli.

Here is the recording of the radio transmission between Lewis Hamilton and the McLaren team:

Here  is the recording of the radio transmission between Jarno Trulli and the Toyota team:

Here is the interview given by Lewis Hamilton to the Media immediately after the race:

McLaren team boss Martin Whitmarsh doesn’t think the team did anything wrong:

We, the team, made a mistake.  We did not provide a full account of a radio conversation which we believe was being listened to in any case, and we don’t believe was material to the decisions being made by the stewards. At that time, we did not know that Trulli was right off the circuit and Lewis was asked to give back the place to Trulli. That was a team view, having not seen it, and we thought it was the safest thing to do.

Hamilton did not agree but attempts to get an answer from Race Control failed and the the race ended under the Safety Car. McLaren assumed in the hearing that the stewards were aware of the radio exchanges that had taken place but it seems they were not.

The whole thing has been a huge fuckup and it is ridiculous it has taken the FIA so long to come to a definitive decision on the controversy.  Speaking to German broadcaster RTL, Former World Champion Niki Lauder called it “the biggest joke of all time”.

The stewards made a mistake in Australia and the statement that Hamilton “acted in a manner prejudicial to the conduct of the event by providing evidence deliberately misleading to the Stewards” just sounds like they are trying to weasel out of a complete failure of the sport’s adminstration.

Why couldn’t McLaren get an answer from race control?  Why didn’t the stewards listen to all pertinant evidence before making a decision?  And why has it taken so long for the matter to be decided?

A spokesman for the FIA has stated:

Given the seriousness of this matter, we cannot rule out further action at this stage.

Good grief!  What could the further action be?  Suspension from races or even the rest of the 2009 season?

The Formula One circus continued today with the FIA stripping Lewis Hamilton of all the points he earned in Australia because he “acted in a manner prejudicial to the conduct of the event by providing evidence deliberately misleading to the Stewards.”  Toyota’s Jarno Trulli has had his third place finish reinstated.

Confusion has surrounded the result of Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix when Lewis Hamilton passed Jarno Trull under the safety car after Trulli ran off the track.  Trulli later passed Hamilton to reclaim third place but was later penalised 25 seconds for passing under the safety car and so dropped to 12th place.

The stewards original ruling suggested that while Hamilton’s pass was legal, Trulli’s was not but the Toyota driver has always claimed that Lewis Hamilton slowed to let him retake third position.  Toyota had planned to appeal the decision but later decided the appeal was unlikely to succeed.

A recording of the Toyota radio communications shows how confusing the situation was for trulli:

The statement from the stewards reads:

The Stewards having considered the new elements presented to them from the 2009 Australian Formula One Grand Prix, consider that driver No 1 Lewis Hamilton and the competitor Vodafone McLaren Mercedes acted in a manner prejudicial to the conduct of the event by providing evidence deliberately misleading to the Stewards at the hearing on Sunday 29th March 2009, a breach of Article 151c of the International Sporting Code. Under Article 158 of the International Sporting Code the driver No 1 Lewis Hamilton and the competitor Vodafone McLaren Mercedes are excluded from the race classification for the 2009 Australian Grand Prix and the classification is amended accordingly.

This is a bad start to the season and is only going to encourage the conspiracy theorists who think the FIA have it in for McLaren. Thank god Ferrari aren’t involved.

As I said before, what we need to see now are the “new elements presented” to the stewards. It has been nearly a week and we haven’t seen a post-race report from the stewards explaining their decisions. We have seen video of Hamilton passing Trulli and now we have Toyota’s radio transmissions but what we still haven’t seen is Trulli’s pass of Hamilton and, perhaps most importantly, McLaren’s radio transmissions.

I really hope we get to see all the evidence the stewards had when making their decisions. What is needed is openness and clarity regarding the rules and the stewards interpretation. Is it any wonder that McLaren were worried about Hamilton’s pass on Trulli after being so harshly dealt with at Spa last year?

It’s raining heavily in Malaysia right now. Malaysia is always hot and showers are common but heavy rain is forecast until Monday so it’s highly likely Sunday’s Grand Prix will be a wet one. Wet races can be exciting – except when it is so wet the race has to be abandoned – but if it rains on Sunday it promises to be particularly interesting.

Firstly, it would be the first race run in the wet with the new aerodynamic regulations. The new rules for 2009 that shrunk the rear wing and banned all the little appendages from the cars effectively cut the amount of downforce in half. The talented engineers managed to claw some of that back but the cars will still be running with significantly less downforce than last year. On a dry track this is just about offset by the return of slicks but you can’t run slicks when it is raining. This means the cars will have much less grip on a wet track than they would have had last year. Jarno Trulli already complained about the handling of his car when testing at a rain-soaked track in Portugal in January:

In the conditions it was very difficult to get temperature in the tyres. It was really hard for everyone out there and it was nearly impossible to drive.

But grip won’t be the only problem the drivers could face. Like in Melbourne last weekend, the Malaysian Grand Prix will start at 5pm local time. This is good for European television viewers but not so helpful for the drivers. Williams driver Nico Rosberg reckons it is dangerous to run races so late in the day without lighting and suggests bringing the race start forward an hour:

I think twilight racing is not the way to go. In Melbourne it was obvious that it just increases the danger so much. The visibility is so difficult, you can’t even see the edges of the track in some corners. I was driving into the sun and that’s not what racing is about. So I really hope they reconsider that. Even moving it forward by one hour or something will help us massively. It was just the last part of the race that was the really problematic time.

A monsoon would only make the skies darker with a very real chance of the race having to be stopped.

But supposing it isn’t too wet or too dark to race, who might do well? There seem to be a few wet weather specialists on the grid now. Jenson Button won his first race at a wet Hungaroring in 2006, his team mate Rubens Barrichello cut through the field in Silverstone last year thanks to Ross Brawn’s perfect tyre choice to finish third in the same race that Lewis Hamilton drove to a stunning victory, and Sebastian Vettel’s maiden win was at Monza in the rain.

They have all performed well in the wet but I think if Hamilton stays out of trouble with the stewards we could see another epic performance. After his win at Silverstone in 2008, Sir Jackie Stewart said of Hamilton:

In this race many people went off the track – Felipe Massa spun on five occasions, just by putting the power on far too early and far too hard. But Lewis drove almost flawlessly to win by 68 seconds – an enormous margin – and demonstrated that he’s unquestionably the best wet weather driver of this current generation.

It just wouldn’t be Formula One without race stewards applying controversial penalties and last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix started the season in fine form.

Hanging over the whole weekend was the question of the legality of the Brawn, Williams and Toyota diffusers.  While Rubens Barrichello thinks his car would be quick even without the fancy diffuser and the race stewards declared it legal, Ferrari, Renault and Red Bull are taking their appeal to court on 14 April.  Williams made a point by lodging a counter-protest against Ferrari and Red Bull only to withdraw it “in the interests of the sport.”  I really hope the case is rejected but until then the results of the Australian Grand Prix and possibly Malaysia will be provisional.

The race itself was subject to some controversial decisions, too.  In the final laps, Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel put his car where Robert Kubica’s BMW was and a promising race ended badly for them both.

Vettel was quick to offer his appologies to Kubica and team boss Mario Theissen and was duly handed a 10 place penalty for causing the accident.  But was it really his fault?  It looked like a racing incident to me.  Michael Schumacher seems to think so too, telling Germany’s Bild newspaper:

He (Vettel) was on the inside – he couldn’t make his car dissolve into thin air.

And Kubica himself isn’t too sure either:

It’s difficult to say who is at fault. I think he was a bit optimistic. If that was the last corner of the last lap it’s OK, but in the first race it’s important to score the points. It’s important you understand what position you are in.

Could it be that Vettel was penalised for being too honest?  If he had just kept his mouth shut and not been so apologetic perhaps the stewards would have let the incident pass.

Jarno Trulli was another disappointed driver.  Before the race even started, Toyota had been found guilty of having a flexible rear wing but after some hasty modifications they were allowed to start from the pits. After a great drive from Trulli we again had the situation where one of the drivers on the podium later has his trophy taken away by the stewards.  Ironically it was all caused by the Vettel – Kubica shenanigans.  Trulli’s Toyota slipped off the track under the safety car and Lewis Hamilton had no choice but to pass him.  According to the rules, overtaking under the safety car is permitted “if any car slows with an obvious problem”, like running off the track.

The problem seems to be that McLaren, understandably nervous about illegal passing manouvers after the 2008 Belgian Grand Prix where Hamilton was deemed to have passed Räikkönen illegally, thought they should hand third place back to Trulli so Lewis slowed and allowed him to pass.  Here is a video showing Trulli slipping off the track and Hamilton (legally) going past:

Unfortunately I haven’t found any video of Trulli taking the place back but Jarno clearly felt he had little choice:

I thought he had a problem so I overtook him as there was nothing else I could do.

The 25 second penalty handed down destroyed a great drive by Trulli and Toyota announced their intentions to appeal the decision:

There are circumstances surrounding the incident that we feel have not been taken into consideration. On Sunday, we announced our intention to appeal the ruling to the International Sporting Court of Appeals. We are currently undertaking procedures to formally appeal the ruling within 48 hours, collecting data to be used as proof of our position.

It’s all very confusing. Last year the stewards came in for some criticism over their decisions and according to an FIA meeting back in November of 2008, a number of new stewarding arrangements were to be put in place in 2009, in particular the following:

Following the race, a short written explanation of steward’s decisions will be published on the FIA website. This will supplement the formal steward’s decision which largely defines the breach of the rules.

The FIA have an awful lot of documentation on their website about lap times and scrutineering checks but the Stewards’ Report is conspicuously absent.

I do hope this information is posted soon as it is important to see how the race stewards arrived at their decisions. At least a Ferrari wasn’t involved so there are no conspiracy theories. Yet.

Photograph: Darren McNamara/AP