Fx wrote:
Alonso leading Schumacher in Italy how likely was it that the marshalls would push his car back on the track ?
Two reasons for it being very unlikely and none of them is related with the fact that Alonso wasn’t driving a red car or with the fact that Alonso happened to be temporarily in front of a 2s per lap faster driver...
First reason. All the gravel traps on the Monza’s track (I don’t know about other tracks I can just assume it’s the same) are quite deep, minumum 20-25 cm in the very first part close to the track and way more than half a meter in the deepest point, because the aim is to stop the car. It’s quite hard just walk on it, let alone to try to push a trapped car with your feet sinking in the gravel. Once the car is stopped with the underfloor touching the gravel (as in the Alonso’s case, since the rear wheels were freely spinning) there’s no way to move the car but lifting it. Had Alonso stopped a few meters forward, with half car on the kerb, probably the kerb itself would have prevented the underfloor to touch the gravel and maybe he would have had a chance to be pushed back on the track, but given the position where he stopped, sorry, no way.
Second reason. few days after the Nurburgring 2003 race I’ve seen the Italian gp race director, Davide Galbiati, on a tv program about motorsport we have on a local tv on Thursday night (he’s often a guest when there are rules related episodes) and he said that, although what the marshals did there was clearly inside the rules, he would have instructed the Monza’s marshals to avoid to push back on the track a driver stuck in the gravel and in a dangerous position. He also said that, if the safety measures are correctly designed, to remove the car is far less dangerous than to try to push it back on the track, also considering that this would throw debris and gravel on the tarmac. Galbiati also made a phone call at the same tv program during the pre-gp tests, the same day of the MS and Trulli incidents, and he was really worried about the tyre problem because we had lot of accidents during both recent tests here, in June and in September, most of them tyre/suspensions related (Zonta, Massa, Panis twice, Fisichella, MS, Trulli...) and a couple of them happened exactly at Variante della Roggia. He made it very clear that he would have avoided any unnecessary risk at the gp. To try to push a car back on the track requiring the driver to spin to put himself in the right direction, in a blind corner with other cars passing at short intervals and arriving at 330-340 km/h at the braking point, is an avoidable risk.
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