From the first few laps of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, it was quickly realized by all the drivers and teams that there could be serious traffic problems due to the narrowness of some areas of the track and also the large number of blind corners in Jeddah.
That was exactly what happened during the last practice sessions, when Nikita Mazepin was on a fast lap and Lewis Hamilton was recharging his batteries. The Russian pilot had to react unexpectedly to avoid colliding with the British.
The action was shown by the FOM and the danger of the movement was perfectly appreciated, which is why Hamilton ended up receiving a €25,000 fine and a reprimand.
Despite this and given some of the criticism that quickly flooded social networks, it was Nikita Mazepin himself who came out in defense of Lewis Hamilton as soon as he finished qualifying on the Saudi urban track.
This is how the Russian driver explained what happened: “I was on a fast lap, going through turns 7 and 8, which are straight with these cars. In addition, they are all blind and I did not know that there was a slow car on the racing line”.
“I kept going until a moment I saw that he was not going to move. And… it was not a big deal on my part, we trained a lot to have the necessary reactions to avoid this type of situation,” he added.
Speaking more specifically about what could have happened, the Haas driver acknowledged that the only thing he wanted at all times was not to harm Hamilton , since he is fighting for the world championship with Max Verstappen: “We have sent text messages about that. And yeah, I was just hoping that he could have a good qualifying. And in the end he did it like always, so that’s the main thing.”
“He told me that he felt very sorry for what happened and recognized that he hadn’t done the best job. It’s really nice to see the experienced generation paying attention to these things,” added the Russian.
To finish, Nikita Mazepin wanted to take even more iron out of the controversy and tried to get both his engineer and Hamilton ‘s, who should have warned about the traffic, also to get away with this incident.
“You trust your engineer, but he’s not a robot, he’s a human and he’s got a lot of jobs to do. Engineers really don’t deserve criticism for stuff like that. And in my case particularly, I’m always happy to take the blame.”
