After the 2021 season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix fiasco, seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton called out Formula 1 to ensure that race officials were not biased for the upcoming 2022 F1 season which begins on March 19, 2022 in Bahrain.
As 2022 F1 pre-season testing began this week in Barcelona, Hamilton used part of his time to point out an issue that may have led to the obvious events of the Abu Dhabi fiasco that then led to then-race director, Michael Masi, to go rogue with official rule applications that essentially prevented Hamilton from winning his eighth world title.
Since then, both F1 and their governing body, FiA, have failed miserably to address the results of that race – only doing the bare minimum of making Masi the deserved scapegoat by removing him from that position [but only re-assigning him] and instituting a VAR-style system that will supposedly prevent similar Masi-type instances from occurring in the future – but nothing about the race results which were officially logged after Masi’s multiple errors.
“Race drivers are sometimes very, very good friends with certain individuals. Some travel with certain individuals and tend to take a more keen liking to some of them. So just people who have no bias is super-essential when it comes to making decisions,” said Hamilton.