heros and zeros at Canada

[Chameleon]

The video is very interesting (I must have just beaten Bernie to the punch).  For a start, it shows that there was room to Raikkonen's left and that is probably what he was aiming for, therefore.  Note too the smoke from Hamilton's front tyre before he impacts - he had those brakes on as far as they would go and they seemed hardly to slow the car at all.  So much for F1 cars stopping on a dime.

This is even better illustrated by watching Rosberg - again there seems little deceleration from quite a slow speed before he hits Hamilton's car.  I think what we're seeing is how inefficient carbon fibre brakes are if allowed to drop below optimum temperature.  And they would have cooled during the pit stops, of course.

The positioning of the light seems reasonable but I suspect strongly that it is not so easily seen from the drivers' point of view.  The number of incidents involving the Montreal lights would be explained if this is so.

I am not trying to excuse Hamilton's error - it was a mistake, even if the brakes had been less effective than he expected.  But I don't think he deserves the amount of criticism he is getting.  It was an understandable accident and one that will be repeated as long as the red light remains at the end of the pit lane.

[Steven Roy]

Pit lane surfaces are no suitable for race braking.  Especially the end of the pitlane which tends to have all sorts of oil, water , fuel etc on it.  Effectively it is like a green track only worse.  A bit like a bus stop on a green track where cars sit with their engines idling dropping all sorts of fluids.  It is very easy to spin under braking at the end of a pit lane.

[Alianora La Canta]

If Hamilton's car had smoke coming from it, then he must have locked the brake (which quite often happens when a driver panic-brakes through not seeing something in time), which means it was effectively out of his control. Locked brakes don't do much for stopping power. The point of having a speed limit in the pit lane is so that drivers can stop quickly when needed. If Lewis wasn't driving in a manner in which that was possible, then either the speed limit in the pit lane needs reducing or he wasn't driving with due care and attention.

Rosberg, despite having less space to brake in, managed to scrub a lot more speed off - the relative lack of damage to Rosberg's car and the back of Hamilton's car compared to Raikkonen's and the front of Hamilton's car indicates that Rosberg was slower at the point of impact. Red lights at the end of pit lanes risk collisions, but only if someone isn't paying attention to what's going on round them or something very unusual occurs in terms of technical failure timings.

[Mitch14]

hamilton was an idiot you could see he drove into the back of kimi