A penalty was justified but 20 seconds was insanely excessive, and completely out of contrast to similar incidents and penalties in previous races, completely took the most interesting battle out of the race.
Rest of the race was pretty boring. Very few overtakes that actually mattered. The one battle that could've been interesting ended up not happening due to Leclerc almost going into the wall.
He got a serious warning last week, but he did not learn from it. This will cost him badly, next year Norris will drive nr 1. Maybe that will be a lesson for him.
This was actually good and worthwhile from Max's perspective. He got to hold Norris up the whole first stint, which ultimately most likely cost him the win. Norris P1 and Max P4 would have been a much worse outcome for him points-wise, so I'm not sure Max is going to learn a whole lot from this race other than "I'll do it again".
The minimum penalty for that type of incident is 10 seconds. The T8 incident is unquestionably a penalty. The T4 incident was separate and if the FIA also penalizes that, it has to be 20 seconds total.
The FIA says the outcome of the incident doesn't influence the penalty, so by similar logic you'd think subsequent incidents would also not affect the penalty.
Agree with you, in my opinion Verstappen deserved that 20 seconds penalty (10+10). Anyway the regulation should be reviewed, the rule of the apex a bit absurd nowadays.
We had three 5 seconds penalties for pushing a driver off track last week. In all cases, the driver pushed off track lost position. Yesterday Lando cut the chicane after being forced wide and ended up ahead of Verstappen resulting in a gain of position. Considering all this, how is 10 seconds justified here for the T4 incidentยฟ? T8 was a much more egregious move by max and was proportionally punished.