[PapaofGags]

320 drain covers? anyone with a welder report to Baku...…   

[Jody Barton]

320 drain covers? anyone with a welder report to Baku...…   

They're not welding them down apparently. It seems LM and the FIA gave them permission to just "bolt" them down as welding causes damage and expense the organisers didn't want to have to swallow. Sorry, I don't think Baku is therefore safe to run the event. If those manhole covers aren't welded down, or they refuse to do it, then they should cancel the race. If that happened in racing conditions at the start of the race you're risking lives been lost.

[PapaofGags]

   

[morini]

Well, I thought welding the covers down was always mandatary at street circuits? Wrong again I guess!!

So I ddn't get to watch any of P1, how much running beofore this happened?

[edit]
Nevermind, just checked. Only 10 minutes running. Wonder if they will cancel the weekend?

[PapaofGags]

So I ddn't get to watch any of P1, how much running beofore this happened?

Nevermind, just checked. Only 10 minutes running. Wonder if they will cancel the weekend?

Most exciting bit was the recovery driver's HIAB hitting the bridge...     

Guessing every welder within a 100 miles has had a phone call!  

[Jody Barton]

I'm not sure they've been able to go ahead with F2 qualifying, and drivers and teams are rightly asking why the manhole covers are just bolted down and not welded down. I don't think if they're not welded down we'll see any further running this weekend. We're just lucky it wasn't during the start of a race because that could have been a disaster. I think we have the very real prospect that this might need to be a cancelled event.

[morini]

Nah, a tube of "no more nails", few blobs under every cover, sorted

[PapaofGags]

Would love to be a fly on the wall when the question is asked...

"who decided to bolt down rather than weld the drain covers?"    

[Jody Barton]

From listening to what Kravitz was saying the teams weren't informed that Baku had been given permission to just bolt them down rather than weld them down. There's no way I think teams would send cars out onto a circuit if they'd have known they were just bolted down.

Also Ted getting all this information in seconds and grabbing FIA representatives and stuff while Karun stated the bleeding obvious and tried getting us excited about hydraulic fluid that had leaked onto the Wiliams just shows there is no substitute for a proper journalist in these instances. Ted is way better than Karun, embarrassingly so, Ted was seeking out the right story while Karun was waiting for the Williams to return to the pit, literally waiting for the story to come to him.

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They have bolted them down and the FIA have given the all clear to go racing... so F2 qualifying while delayed is going on, and FP2 will happen. If there is a repeat of the manhole cover incident I think there is massive exposure in terms of liability.

[morini]

I was just about to post that GP2 qualy is on Sky live, so they must have deemed it safe. See Jody has already mentioned it.