- 10,373
- Manchester
- Ardius_
There is a line, you can have a small unintentional incident of which you don't remember much about since it didn't knock you out of focus, I have done that many a time in karting, ask me to recall the details of the start of a race just after it has happened and if it is in a large grid and thus rather chaotic I won't remember much. Racing driver excuses are used in this situation simply because we like to justify something and make sense of it to ourselves, the b-s mostly comes from piecing together a very small amount of data we remember. This is only appropriate in non intentional incidents however.
I agree and thats what I was talking about. I did say that part of racing driver excuses comes from the fact that:
a) admitting fault leads to penalties
and
b) questioning themselves whether they did the right thing is sometimes too big a question - if you are uncertain whether you really were in the right, perhaps sometimes this can have a massive effect on confidence.
I just think that its not fair to criticise drivers for their comments when they are interviewed immediately after a race, when they haven't see the same footage we have and haven't been able to go through each detail piece by piece. Its not easy to remember every detail and I'm pretty sure 90% of the drivers who have these "excuses" will happily admit fault when they see the replay footage - Villenueve is one of those I feel.
However in the case of the Plato incident he planned it, that was a concious decision he made, he wasn't just racing he came out of focusing on racing to do that move and push the other person off. Plato in that interview was plain lying, to do that move he must have thought about it, and the fact that his reason was so false shows how bad he is at lying.
I wasn't referring to Plato. I'm not going to comment much on him as its been done to death so many times before but I fully agree he planned it and was blatantly lying about it. This isn't racing drivers excuses.
What I'm referring to is incidents like those Villenueve ones or the Andretti one or even recently Vergne and Ricciardo crashing into the Caterhams. All except Villenueve's resulted in them crashing out themselves so pretty clearly they weren't lying to try and cheat or anything.