The mirrors responsible for the Hamilton/Massa incident?

The director of the McLaren Mercedes team acknowledged that his driver was sitting low in his single-seater and that his viewing angle in the mirrors is not always ideal. And it’s true that in the footage of the incident, it appears the British driver doesn’t see his Brazilian counterpart approaching and cuts across, leading to the collision – it was the same situation at Spa-Francorchamps during the accident with Kamui Kobayashi.

Martin Whitmarsh, who is also the President of FOTA – the Formula One Teams’ Association – thinks that something should be done to improve the visibility of drivers in the mirrors, especially at high speeds, as he acknowledged that his drivers could only distinguish color blobs indicating the presence of a car behind them.

Compared to what was done twenty years ago, they are bigger, but in terms of vibrations, we probably don’t do enough. If you talk to any driver on the straight, it’s not enough. In fact, they focus on color: ‘there’s a spot of color behind me, so that means there’s another car.’ Maybe that’s something we should study, Martin Whitmarsh confided.

Whitmarsh also specified that the 2008 world champion might have been slightly distracted during the collision, as his car had a problem and he was trying to return to the pits without causing too much damage to his MP4-26.

« I think Lewis was distracted at that moment, he knew he had a puncture, and he knew he had to be careful with the car, so I think you can always have bigger mirrors, you can have better mirrors, you can have better mirror positioning and you can be more attentive in your mirrors. But these things still happen nonetheless, » added Whitmarsh.