It should have been a black flag for out-of-control Vettel

THE most dastardly trick I ever saw live at a racetrack happened a few yards from the music-pumping Rascasse bar at Monaco in 2006. Michael Schumacher pranged his Ferrari to stop Fernando Alonso getting pole. Alonso himself won a Singapore Grand Prix by dint of another staged crash that will live in infamy. But he was robbed by Schumacher that day by the Med. A ‘cheap cheat’ was the verdict of Keke Rosberg, the 1982 champion, a phrase so damning it will hang over the Schumacher story in perpetuity. And yesterday another German, a driver who worshipped Schumacher, the brilliantly able Sebastian Vettel, let himself down almost as hideously in Baku. He turned his Ferrari into a battering ram by steering into Lewis Hamilton. If I had done that on my Sunday drive, I’d have had my collar felt. It had to be road rage, pure and simple. The cowardly stewards gave Vettel a 10-second stop-go penalty, a miserly punishment for such law-breaking. And the world was watching. He should have been black-flagged, that is to say disqualified, rather than allowed to extend his championship lead by finishing two-tenths of a second ahead of fifth-placed Hamilton. When the Brit made his plaintive plea to Charlie Whiting, the race director, that the punishment did not fit the crime, he was correct. I am a big admirer of Hamilton, though not an uncritical one, and I absolve him of all blame. Vettel did not, saying: ‘Nothing happened. He brake-checked me. What do you expect?’ Hamilton, as race leader, had every right to behave as he did behind the safety car — letting it get away. It is the second-placed man’s responsibility not to ram the leader, as he did, which stoked the anger that led him — red-mist having descended — to turn in on Hamilton. Vettel apparently could not resist the urge. It was dangerous. For the safety of the other drivers, a man so out of control should not have been allowed to continue. I imagine that if Max Mosley was still FIA president — in an age when the governing body offered leadership rather than management — this would be far from the end of the matter.