Hi everybody.
I was looking for videos about F1 in early 90's with French commentary when I saw the video of the start of the 1989 Japanese GP ( okay I think most of you have already see it in other languages ) :
Is that me or did Prost jumped the start? Okay, he was on the clean side but to me he started way before everyone else. Even the Ferrari behind Senna hesitate to start after seeing Prost going.
I'm not intending to retrigger the Prost/Senna thing because I'm a fan of both drivers
That's a close one to call. All I can say is that it would probably have been called a jump start by modern standards: there's basically no reaction time (it's supposed to be about .2 of a second at best for a normal human being) so Prost did probably "gamble" on the moment the lights would go green and got a bit lucky. You don't see that too often nowadays, as I think the reaction time is taken into account when calling false starts.
For a perfect reaction time, watch (again) Rosberg's onboard from Malaysia 2009 (on the official review DVD). Even he called it "almost a jump start".
tderias wrote:His car definitely moved before the lights went green, but whether he was out of the grid box yet or not is debatable.
But that doesn't matter if he is out of the grid box or not. If his car is moving before the lights are green, he has to get a penalty.
Well back then it was common for cars to creep on the line and it was also rare for jump start penalties to be applied. An example of this was that in 1995 they introduced electronic measures to check for jump starts, and in the first few races of the season it was not uncommon for at least 4 cars to be assessed a jump start penalty in the race.
Check out this video from around 6:20. Lots of the cars jumped the starts and no penalties were given!
So yes by the standards of today Prost would have been penalised, but it is unfair in my opinion to make such black and white judgement calls about things which happened in the past.
tderias wrote:His car definitely moved before the lights went green, but whether he was out of the grid box yet or not is debatable.
But that doesn't matter if he is out of the grid box or not. If his car is moving before the lights are green, he has to get a penalty.
Well back then it was common for cars to creep on the line and it was also rare for jump start penalties to be applied. An example of this was that in 1995 they introduced electronic measures to check for jump starts, and in the first few races of the season it was not uncommon for at least 4 cars to be assessed a jump start penalty in the race.
Check out this video from around 6:20. Lots of the cars jumped the starts and no penalties were given!
So yes by the standards of today Prost would have been penalised, but it is unfair in my opinion to make such black and white judgement calls about things which happened in the past.
LMAO! that was a joke, I mean how did they get away with that hahaha
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