More than three hours passed after Max Verstappen had taken the chequered flag before he was officially confirmed as the victor, by which time everyone bar the packer-uppers and journalists hadleft the track. Football fans frustrated by VAR must be thankful that for all their complaints the system operates with swift efficiency compared to the glacial process of reviews in F1. Red Bull’s Verstappen, who had dropped to seventh from pole on the opening lap, made a superb comeback until he was vying with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc for the win. The driver representative was the nine-time Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen, as wise and experienced a head as one could ask for to make calls on close racing. He was accompanied by Silvia Bellot, another hugely experienced race steward across a variety of disciplines for more than a decadeand who had started her career marshalling, aged 16 in 2001. Any fine interpretation of rules or indeed precedent would have been handled by Nish Shetty, a judge on the FIAinternationalcourt of appeal and a national steward at the Singapore Grand Prix. With the incident occurring with just two laps to go, the decision would be deferred until after the flag given they would need some time to examine the case and speak to both drivers. However, immediately after the race, the top three drivers have to perform their post-race interviews in a secure area, parc fermé. This is not new in F1, post-race adjudications,specifically involving drivers in the top three, often conclude several hours after the meeting has finished. In Austria, however, the process then still took a full hour and 45 minutes to conclude, longer than the race itself and illustrative of the other problem facing the stewards. The racing is now so highly prescriptive, governed by swathes of detailed rules that their interpretation and implementation has become an immensely complex task, requiring exhaustive examination ofmultiple sources of information.
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