Was Perez a distracted driver?
Auto racing teams, for years and years, communicated with their drivers by hanging message boards over the pit wall.
Drivers were able to concentrate on the job at hand, knowing that the only time they had to switch mental gears was when they went roaring past the pits and had to glance over for a signal that might have said, “EZ,” or “PIT NEXT LAP,” or “P2 CLOSING.”
These days, everybody uses radios. Even the TV guys get into the act during parade laps or caution periods: “Hey Jimmie, DW here. You copy?”
Now, it’s one thing to bother a racing driver when he or she is going slowly. Quite another when they’re going a thousand miles an hour.
Last Sunday, during the Grand Prix of Malaysia, Mexican driver Sergio Perez was running down the leader, Fernando Alonso of Spain. In a matter of a few laps, he’d closed the gap from 7.7 seconds to 2.5 and it was obvious that before long he was going to be right behind the two-time world champion and planning to pass him.
Suddenly, Perez had to listen to a radio transmission from his employer’s pit: “Checo — be careful, we need this position, we need this position.”
Conspiracy theorists have had a field day since, trying to decipher exactly what the message conveyed:
Did the Sauber team tell him that he was heading for the best Formula One finish in the history of that organization and so he shouldn’t do anything that might screw it up?
Or did they tell him that since they got their engines from Ferrari, it wouldn’t be wise to pass (as David Coulthard suggested during the TV presentation)? Or what? People have been talking since last Sunday about what Sauber really meant by that message and there still isn’t a consensus.
So you can imagine how troubling it must have been for Perez, who had to decipher the symbolism of what he’d just heard while continuing to drive his racing car at ten-tenths-plus.
And I think that’s the reason Sergio Perez suddenly found his car up on a curb and heading for a gravel trap.
I think it was because he was thinking so hard about what he’d just heard that he lost his concentration ever so briefly, and it nearly put him out of the race.
It was a classic case of distracted driving of the kind ordinary motorists witness (or contribute to) dozens of times a day on highways and byways around the world.
Perhaps Sauber (and everybody else in racing) should review their radio transmission policy and restrict the messaging to those times when the cars are going past the pits, just like in the good old days.