McGuinness: Why no black flag?
What a bizarre weekend – it feels like the rules are getting in the way of the racing. Now it seems that the talking point is not how good the racing was, it’s about who touched the green paint. Somewhere along the line there needs to be some common sense. It seems race control are more concerned about giving penalties than they are watching the racing, where is it going to end?
Yet they seemed completely blindsided by Quartararo’s leathers being undone. I think he should have been black-flagged immediately. There are lots of young people who look up to these guys and it’s not acceptable to be riding around at 200mph with your leathers hanging off. He also chucked his chest protector, I know they aren’t hard but I wouldn’t have liked to have taken that in the throat at 120mph. But the question now is what happened because everyone seems to have gone underground.
If it was an Alpinestars problem he would have been screaming his head off immediately – but he hasn’t, plus he zipped them up OK on the in lap.
Leathers don’t come unzipped by themselves.
I don’t honestly think he knows what happened. Why would he even be thinking about undoing his leathers while in the heat of battle on the edge of everything in a MotoGP race? If there had been a get out of jail free excuse he could have used to justify it he would have said it by now. From a rider’s point of view I don’t blame him for carrying on but race control can’t point fingers at people for dangerous riding when they allow him to do that. They have a duty of care to the riders and as soon as they saw that it should have been ‘boom’ black flag. I can’t see how it’s up for debate.
‘Race control have a duty of care here’