Thanks for the explanations from all. The bit I suppose I was surprised by, was the fact that under the safety car condtions NOR was able to pull ahead to increase the gap to over 30s over VER*. If he was still driving within the allowed speed then fair enough. It just still feels like a gained advantage under safety car conditions**. As in everyone else got caught by the SC and thus were forced to drive slower than NOR and NOR was allowed by the rules to drive faster. Just doesn't sit well with my concept of "fair" racing. I'd argue that rather than how it works now all cars (whether having been picked up by the SC or not) should be forced to drive at a fixed speed. That would have meant that NOR would have entered the pits still 11 seconds ahead of the field which surely would have put him down the field.
Don't get me wrong, this is not an anti NOR sentiment on my part. I just don't understand how what happened can be considered fair.
*This happened pretty quickly from the point the SC notification was displayed on the TV screen.
** to me this is a totally different kind of "gaining advantage under SC" to the usual advantage of a pit stop not dropping a driver back as far as it would under full race pace conditions. Which I have no issue with btw.
I have explained this once, as have others, but will try again as it cannot have been that clear.
The rules are as follows:
1. Safety car is triggered.
2. All cars now drive to a sector time that is delivered to them on their dash (this is much slower than racing speed but faster than the safety car to allow cars elsewhere on track to catch the safety car) or to the speed that the safety car is driving at. Whichever is clearly relevant to them.
3. Safety car goes out onto the track with the aim of the leader ending up behind it as soon as possible.
4. All cars bunch up behind the safety car.
5. Once the hazard has been cleared the safety car goes in.
What happened in this specific case is that the safety car came out in front of VER instead of NOR. This was a mistake, most likely coming from the timing system and human decision making. This allowed NOR to drive faster than the safety car (at the dashboard defined sector times for cars not with the safety car) as in theory he had to catch it up. This is why it has been commented that some people thought that NOR could gain a lap on everyone when he caught up. Clearly this was not acceptable and the FIA were already sorting out fixing this by getting all the grid bar NOR to go past the safety car and then when NOR caught up with the safety car the rest gradually bunched up behind him (it took nearly 2 laps for this to happen).
NOR was able to get into pits and change his tyres, which as I explained had the advantage that it was a very low pressure pitstop.
Had it all happened as it was supposed to, NOR was 11 secs ahead of VER and the safety car would not have come out until NOR passed the safety car track entrance point. This required the grid to complete most of a race lap, all going at the dash defined sector times to effectively neutralize the race. NOR would have pitted from the lead, but under a bit of pressure, and most likely got out in the lead as have meant that NOR would have pitted from the lead and most likely come out in the lead. This is because every car was travelling much slower (FIA defined sector times for all cars) so instead of a pitstop costing a driver around 22 seconds, it would only have cost around 9 seconds in delta time on the track. Leaving NOR enough time to comfortably (assuming a typical McLaren pitstop with no errors) get in for the pitstop and then rejoin in the lead.
You are right that if NOR had had to pit from behind the safety car with all the cars behind him, then he would have rejoined in the pack. But this was not the case.
So as I stated before, the only advantage NOR gained was an easy pitstop.
And we ended up with NOR in first and VER second etc behind the safety car, just like we would have done had the safety car gone out when it should have done.
