Hamilton dropped his speed and gave back his place. Which is what he had to do. The only reason he made it through was that Raikkonen both messed up his exit of busstop, was terribly slow down the straight* followed by cocking up La Source spectaculary. Raikkonen was slower than Hamilton both before and after the incident - just look at how much more trouble he's having controlling the car. The McLaren car is just times better in conditions such as those, and you can pretty much guarantee that if he had been able to make it round the corner rather than being blocked, he'd still have been in such a strong position to overtake for these reasons.
* - Raikkonen was losing about a second a sector to Hamilton on the previous lap, and pressure aside wasn't posing much of a problem for Hamilton once ahead. He just didn't have the pace to keep his place. It seems likely that his tyres lost their heat much more than Hamiltons did. The only reason he was as close as he was when Hamilton encounterd Rosberg was that he'd run off the track and used the high friction tarmac runoff, which had more grip than the track. (What's that, going off track to gain an advantage, surely not. See also: Massa using the off track area at the end of Fuji last year to take a place off Kubica, where the tarmac off the road was much more grippy than the track. Was there any investigation? No.)
Besides he had no choice but to go over the chicane... To his right was the Ferrari, straight ahead was an extremely slippery curb/bump/turf area which would almost certainly have spun him into the ferrari and handed him a penalty for causing an avoidable incident, so the only option was to bump along the turf/tarmac/paint to his left (Look at the way the car travels, he isn't going over the tarmac by itself) which would preclude accelerating over the chicane anyway - if you listen to the engine, he's clearly not applying the throttle over the chicane.
But still, it's not like there's no precedent for this.Time and again, people have done pretty much the same thing (Give back a place and then retake it immediately) and yet this is the first time it's penalised? Indeed, it's hardly uncommon for someone to not be penalised for obvious infractions of these rules.
Meanwhile, Lauda - "This is the worst judgment in the history of F1. The most perverted judgment I have ever seen. It’s absolutely unacceptable when three functionaries (the stewards) influence the championship like this”.
And from the BBC podcast "The entire paddock was united in the view that Hamilton was totally innocent". And that's by no means the only source of that information. Ferrari didn't protest the manoeuvre.
But to look at what they've done fully.
-They've pretty much shat upon what could easily be the most exciting closing laps since France 79.
-They've pretty much ruled out any proper racing.
-They've demoted a man off the top step for a highly dubious racing offense, when in the previous race, they let someone off the winner off after having admitted that he was guilty on a safety offense. (While punishing 3 others for doing the same thing. Senna got done with a drivethrough this weekend in addition to the two at Valencia. He was quite clear when interviewed that it was not consistent with the Massa incident)
-Relatedly, they've shown complete disregard for consistency yet again. Since I can remember, all you had to do if you gained or held a position through cutting a corner is to give it back, not give it back and wait for your opponent to scamper off into the distance. People have always been allowed to cut corners should they have got sufficiently out of shape that it became necessary.
-They've opened themselves up to (more) accusations of corruption. And this time it's coming very loudly from supporters of pretty much every team. It's certainly seems to be a rare person who believes Donnelly to be at all non-partisan. It's not as if he wasn't regarded as dubious before Spa.
-Two races running, we've had to wait until considerably after the race to get the result. The first despite having many, many laps to go, and the second, despite the team asking it what they'd done was legal and getting a positive response. I can only remember this happening a few times before, usually red flag situations, but also Suzuka '89 (Although admittedly, there wasn't much of a wait there.)
Oh and as a parting shot... One of the stewards (Thatti) got into the motorsport news recently for
thisLovely, a man so stupid that I'd fail to trust him to do up my shoelaces, let alone judge on a race.
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