Why isn't anybody else saying what they think, [...]?
My biggest problem is
time! To get an idea what happened, to built up an opinion and to take anything which has been said so far into account I need to read carefully through all the posts. That takes a while and is only half the way, because "building" a sencefull answer takes the same time again.
I hope you see that I prioritize it higher to answer in such important stuff here instead of writing my race report (which was my main goal earlier, when I fired up the forum).
This is no excuse. It's a fact for me and could be the same for some others. That's why I always have biggest respect for persons like you, who organize such things without asking for anything.
[...]why do I have to stick my neck out everytime and become mr. unpopulare? It is bloody unfair that when I give of my free time to help you out with your analysis I become the villain.
That's indeed not fair. In my perfect world tricky things would be discussed without adding any emotions to find the optimal solution based on the evaluation of pure facts. I try that very often - ask my wife - she hates it!
But due to the fact Nico has the most work to keep it running smoothly I think he deserves to have some extra rights. Or in other words, even if he sometimes sounds a little bit rough, there's no excuse to fight back, because his only intention is to bring it down to the main problem quickly.
Now my view on that HUUUUUGE incident.
If I'd
only consider the rule about one line change only, I had to blame David 100%. But it isn't that easy. Why? Because that line change rule mainly applies in situations where you fight the car behind and David clearly doesn't fight Valter, who was behind with a decent gap.
So in my eyes the
need for a general caution should be the scale here. Applying that scale to the incident I'd allocate the blame 50% to David and 50% to Valter.
David should have known about the car behind even if it has a decent gap. He is the last car of a car pack and must tknow that he will have to brake much earlier than usually. Of course this would bring the car from the back closer very quickly. Since he was braking early on the inside line it wasn't impossible to happen that the car from (far) behind brakes at the usual brakign point and therefore could appeare quickly on the outside. So it wasn't carefull enough to not consider the car (farer) behind.
Valter should have known that there are many cars in front of him. As a result his slipstream is high and his downforce for braking is very low. In addition he must calculate that the extra meters each driver adds to his braking point would add to those from the guy behind and so on. So in my eyes he still didn't add enough safety margin to his braking point. That's his part of not being carefull enough.
Btw, that obligation of taking care for each other is written in the 1st paragraph of the german road traffic regulations. So even if another one is guilty in the first place, the judges will also have a look if the "unguilty" person could have had a chance to avoid an incident by a general amount of caution.