FIA Report: Martin Brundle gives his reaction

Former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports pundit Martin Brundle has offered his reaction to the FIA releasing their report into the final laps of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

The 2022 season got underway over the weekend with Charles Leclerc winning the Bahrain Grand Prix, but we went into Saturday afternoon still not knowing what the outcome was going to be from the investigation into the final race of 2021.

Said investigation, of course, stemmed from Michael Masi’s decision to only let certain cars unlap themselves behind a late Safety Car, in a pretty rarely seen interpretation of the rules, to allow for one final lap of racing which, of course, allowed Max Verstappen to take the world championship from Lewis Hamilton.

Controversial to say the very least, and it was only just before qualifying that we got to see what the FIA had found in their investigation, with them saying human error was to blame for the fiasco and that Michael Masi, now removed as Race Director, had acted in good faith.

Hopefully, we can try and close the chapter now with 2022 throwing up and already entertaining first race and Martin Brundle has said the report should have come out a couple of months ago, in order to move on:

“It feels like something which should have been put to bed in January doesn’t it.

“There is nothing new in there that we didn’t already know, for those of us that were there, through the season, through the last few minutes of that race, I think what happened was almost inevitable in the end when you analyse [it].

“Under pressure mistakes were made, it was a mess. There’s no remedy, we said this minutes after the race, there’s no remedy to unravel that race.

“Nothing’s changed since then except some processes will be put in place