thearmofbarlow wrote: 
Go count how many times contact is made between Arnoux and Villeneuve. What was Prost's penalty for booting Senna? Senna's for booting Prost? Schumacher's for booting Hill?
Why is there a TEN PLACE penalty for tapping someone's front wheel at forty miles per hour? Monaco or not, safety paranoia or not, there's no reason to jack with things on track. Fine them, suspend them, but let's cut this grid penalty garbage out entirely.
You can roll your eyes all you want, those were all incidents in the race between two people competing. Schumacher was lucky to get away with booting Hill, but what was his penalty when he did it to Villeneuve? That's right, disqualification from the entire championship. This is Maldonado's second offence, maybe he should suffer the same penalty.
Prost booting Senna, Senna booting Prost, those were both incidents where two drivers went into a corner without the intention of backing down. Should they have had more respect for each other? Absolutely. Should they have been punished more than they were? Possibly. But still there is a huge difference between driving as if the other car was not there as you don't want to give any quarter in the world championship fight and deliberately ramming someone in a red mist moment in a practice session just because they held you up a little bit when you wanted to go quicker.
And bringing up the Arnoux / Villeneuve battle shows what a joke your argument is. That was a battle for position where they were banging wheels as they tried to go side by side through a whole sequence of corners. They weren't deliberately hitting each other either, it's just very hard to fit two cars through that space and drive alongside each other like that whilst carrying racing speed through the corner so there is bound to be a little wheel tapping. Neither car was hindered or damaged by it, neither driver deliberately steered into the other, neither driver ever complained about it, and it was all conducted with huge respect for each other.
Maldonado clearly has a huge problem respecting his fellow competitors and suffers from real anger management issues if he ever feels someone slighted him. In my view that kind of behaviour has no place in adult life let alone on a race track. He is a thug and a bully, and the FIA need to stand up to him and show him that this behaviour is not at all acceptable in F1. Instead the stewards have chickened out from even looking at whether it was deliberate or not leading to the farcical situation where Maldonado is complaining about the inconsistency of the penalty!
