http://www.irallylive.com/ir_news.htm?00008154&10

After a lot of speculation surrounding Lorenzo Bertelli's accident on SS10 at Rally de Portugal 2015, Carlos Barbosa, the President of the WRC Commission, has spoken out - and he hasn't held back.

Many rally fans have called his comments 'too personal', and rightly so.

"Lorenzo Bertelli was very anxious to go to the arms of his mother, that's all it was." said Barbosa.

"He wanted us to stop the stage so his mother could fly in in the helicopter and pick him up so he didn't have to wait.

"That might be how it works in Italy, but that's not how we do things here in Portugal.

"He was completely OK, but he got very excited and made a big noise about having to wait.

"He thinks because he is the son of Prada this changes everything."

Lorenzo Bertelli responded in a professional manner, but it was clearly difficult for him to mask the emotion in his words. "After 20 minutes I nearly fell to the ground and felt really sick. I asked Gio [Bernacchini, co-driver] to hit the SOS button.

"After we waited already two hours, the spectator who was a medic called to the organisers again and said for us to wait another hour to hour and a half was too much.

"What is the point of having the button if we push it and the organisers do nothing?"

A fine question indeed, and one that rally fans all around the world have been asking non-stop since the accident occurred. After all, if a driver changes his status from OK to SOS, that means that something is wrong and that it needs to be dealt with immediately. But should the organisers of Rally de Portugal really have left the situation in the hands of a spectator who just so happened to be a paramedic?

"We had a paramedic with him and he was reporting his condition every five or 10 minutes." Barbosa said. This paramedic, a spectator at the event, has said very different things according to Bertelli's camp. Barbosa's comments haven't put this topic to bed. In fact, they've shaken it up and made it a whole lot worse.

Barbosa also added, "I have the best rally in the world. We have no problems with the event at all."

It's very clear that there are problems, and the problem isn't with the event itself - it's with the people who decided to put Bertelli's health on the back burner and leave him stranded inside a stage for three and a half hours. Bertelli went to hospital, stayed overnight, had two CAT scans and only left the next day after doctors pronounced him fit to leave.

A head injury is a head injury. The ambulances are on-event for a reason: to go in and retrieve drivers who require medical attention, and if Bertelli's incident was so minor, he wouldn't have had to go to hospital at all.

The question that fans are now asking is this: why has the President of the WRC Commission made personal comments about Bertelli's background and family in relation to an accident he had on an event, and perhaps more directly, what does his family name have to do with asking for medical help?

But the real question comes from Bertelli himself, and we will repeat it again now: "What is the point of having the button if we push it and the organisers do nothing?"