Michael Masi "gifted" Max Verstappen with controversial decision, insists former racer and steward, Danny Sullivan.

Though he only enjoyed one season in F1, with Tyrrell in 1983, his best result being a fifth in Monaco, Sullivan achieved fame with an Indy 500 win in 1985 and the CART title three years later. There were also four Le Mans outings, the American finishing third in 1994 in a Porsche.

A driving force in Red Bull's driver search programme to find an American driver to race in F1, he was the drivers' representative on the stewards' panel for a number of grands prix between 2010 and 2018.

Now, though he was not part of the stewarding team, the American has opened up the wound that is the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, insisting that Michael Masi's decision to allow only certain lapped cars - those running between race leader Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen - to overtake the Safety Car and unlap themselves, and indeed prematurely ending the Safety Car period, was entirely wrong, and "gifted" the Dutchman the title.

"The stewards never had a call on any of that stuff," he tells Epartrade. "People were yelling at him that they didn't want to finish under yellow because it didn't look good. That's why he waved by five cars, which basically gave Max a shot.

"Under the rules, he's supposed to wave by all lapped cars," he continues. "But if they had done that, they wouldn't have finished the race. They would have had to finish under yellow, because the other lapped cars were back further in the field.

"So he let the five by, and then he put Max right behind Lewis. Max had stopped for tyres, Lewis had not, he's on qualifying tyres, he's on reds. Lewis's tyres had 44 laps on them. There was not a chance in hell that he wasn't going to pass him at that stage.

"He," Sullivan insists, referring to Masi, "basically gifted him the world championship on that decision.

To be fair to Michael, he's 23 races into the season," he admits. "These guys are travelling non-stop, they're being beat up all the time by teams, everybody. There's all kinds of controversy. A lot of pressure, lateness, last five minutes of basically the season...

"And again, that's my viewpoint. If you're a Max fan, and I'm a Max fan, don't misunderstand me, but if I'm Dutch and I am leaning more towards Max, I would say 'but that was the call'. And it was, Max didn't do anything.

"But it was not, for me, a good call. That's my opinion and everybody can debate that and we will until we all stop."

That aside, the American was keen to dispel talk of ongoing driver bias among the stewards.

"I'd like to clarify one thing," he says. "There's a driver steward in the room, but there are three other stewards in there as well, so it's a panel decision.

"There's been a couple of cases where I was overruled even though I thought that I was correct, but the other panellists disagreed with all the information that we had. And just to prove, the public would probably like to know this, the data that we have is unequivocal. There's nothing like it. We've got everybody's in-car camera. We've got throttle traces, we've got brake pressure, we've got steering input, we've got in-car cameras.

"In a lot of the cases we interview the drivers, we can if there's a situation after the event. So it's very thorough.

"In all the years I did it, 14 years, I never felt any bias from anybody. Nobody was like, 'well, that's a buddy of mine, so I'm going to rule in their favour or anything like that'. It was pretty straightforward."