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Formula 1’s managing director of motorsport Ross Brawn believes Valtteri Bottas was at fault for the huge Emilia Romagna Grand Prix crash with George Russell.
The Imola race had to be red-flagged after Russell’s Williams and Bottas’s Mercedes had a massive impact on the approach to Tamburello, having made high-speed contact as Russell tried to pass for ninth place.
In his post-race column for F1, Brawn suggested Russell was left with no space to avoid a collision.
“The positive thing is that both drivers escaped unhurt and the cars held up on impact to show how far we’ve come regarding the safety standards,” Brawn wrote.
“Imola is quite a narrow track so there’s not much space. When you add wet grass either side from the rain, it becomes very, very tricky.
“I’m sure both drivers will analyse the incident and learn from it but it did look like Valtteri drifted across and left George nowhere to go.”
The stewards took no action against either driver, ruling that “at no time did either car manoeuvre erratically”, but saying Bottas “maintained his line throughout the incident along the right hand side of the dry line, leaving at least a full car’s width to the right at all times”.
They suggested that a lingering off-line damp patch in the wet-dry race triggered Russell’s loss of control.
“The track appeared to be not especially wet through turn 1 but at the point of closest approach to the right hand side of the track, the right hand side tyres of car 63 [Russell] hit an especially damp patch and the car snap yawed, bearing in mind that the car had low downforce in the rear with the DRS open,” said their report.
Both drivers vehemently blamed the other, with Russell initially rushing to Bottas in the gravel trap and asking “if he was trying to kill us both”.
He suggested the Mercedes driver “jolted very, very slightly to the right, which is a tactical defence that drivers in the past used to do, a sort of [Max] Verstappen move from 2015”.
Bottas argued that Russell willingly took the risk to move onto the damper part of the track.
“It’s just not the place to go in those conditions on slicks,” he said.
“But he still went there and it was his choice to go there and I was doing my job, trying to defend and I’m not going to move away and give him the dry patch of track.”
