“No ability” to postpone F1’s Belgian GP until Monday - FIA’s Masi

Torrential rain meant the Belgian GP didn’t get underway as planned at 1500 local time, with the initial start procedure abandoned after a couple of formation laps.

The teams sat in the pits for over three hours to see if conditions were going to improve.

To ensure a final result was called officially, two laps were completed behind the Safety Car before the race was red-flagged and later abandoned.

Masi explained why the race couldn’t have been moved to Monday.

“There’s no ability to postpone the race until tomorrow,” Masi said. “Obviously from the FIA perspective, jointly with Formula 1, safety is paramount for drivers, the teams and all the spectators. We gave every available opportunity within the rule book and the international sporting code, to give us the best opportunity to be able to complete a race.

“Unfortunately on this occasion, we could not go the full distance that was available but with the provisions within the IC [international code] to stop the clock to see if we could get ourselves in that weather window to have some racing activity.

“There’s a whole range [of reasons]…the list would be pages long between organisers, everyone here, all of us, there’s just no ability to postpone to the following day.”

One point of potential controversy was the decision to award half points after no laps of actual racing.

Explaining why Masi sent the cars out again at 1817 local time, he added: “It was to see what the conditions were like.

“We’re in constant contact with our official weather provider and there was a window that looked like it provided there as we’ve got the requirement to give the 10-minute warning to everyone so it was like ‘OK, let’s try and see if we can find that window’ and a number of teams said the same thing - they saw that window and could see what we were trying to do to find that weather window and then the weather came in and got the better of us again.”