A few hours after the closure of the race in Austria (at the Red Bull ring) a number of drivers got additional time penalties, leading to a shuffling of the race results.
During the race Hamilton complained about Verstappen, and I joked that it would be quite the joke if it was actually Hamilton who would get an extra penalty... and he did 🤔😒😂🤣
Anyway. It's tough. But let's be a bit pragmatic... maybe it doesn't matter as much as some claim.
Taken from the F1 site:
Article 33.3 of the Sporting Regulations reads: “Drivers must make every reasonable effort to use the track at all times and may not leave the track without a justifiable reason.“Drivers will be judged to have left the track if no part of the car remains in contact with it and, for the avoidance of doubt, any white lines defining the track edges are considered to be part of the track but the kerbs are not.
“Should a car leave the track the driver may re-join, however, this may only be done when it is safe to do so and without gaining any lasting advantage. At the absolute discretion of the Race Director a driver may be given the opportunity to give back the whole of any advantage he gained by leaving the track.”
Why is this not really an issue?
1. The FIA probably can probably not process 1200 track limits during the race, so they probably first processed the top 'x' limits, and postponed the rest to process post-race. Should they ignore all the limits because they can't process all?
2. It seems they (The FIA) were planning to do so anyway without AMR's protest. If so, the penalties would have happened, one would assume.
3. Now, the rule is clear: repeatedly exceeding track limits are punished. Period. Complain about it what you want, but that's the case. If the drivers think they can get away with it, then let them try. It's the same as a street circuit. Go over the track limit and you hit the wall. In this case: go over the track limit and you have a penalty.
4. Everyone KNEW about the track limits. They were enforced during qualification, so there's no suprise whatsoever. Do they have to be told each and every time someone crossed the line?
5. The circuit is used for other purposes, so it may not be that easy to modify it to handle both MotoGP and F1. It's what it is.
6. Moving the white line makes no sense. Drivers would just abuse the new positions.
Maybe adding some automated processing would help, yeah, but the problem itself is simple. Drivers went over the limit, so a penalty applies. They just thought they would be getting away with it.
If it would be impossible to stay within the lines every driver would face penalties. Interestingly, some drivers like Alonso and Verstappen had no problems, whilst a famous face like Hamilton was penalized twice... I think, for all his complaining, they could have penalized him a third time 🥳
Do the 1200 violations make sense?
Well, they said 1200 POSSIBLE violations, so yeah, they make sense.
I think it's exactly what it says on the can. They watched 1200 possible violations (maybe triggered by GPS?) and found only 'x' were actual violations. Then they took those 'x' violations and checked per driver how many penalties would result from that, taking into account the positions from other drivers, etc. Also, I use 70 laps. Now I think every four violations would result in a track penalty.
Or am I wrong?
So, how many REAL violations did each driver on average make? Let's assume 10% of the possible violations were real, indisputable ones, then we'd end up with
1200 / # drivers / actual violations ratio = 1200 / 19 / 10 = 6.32 actual track limits per driver over the race. If they were penalized for every four violations it would be 1.58 penalty per driver over the whole race, so there should be at least 19 penalties.
Now, we don't know what is the actual violations ratio, and some drivers (Ocon, Hamilton, to name a few (cough, sorry, couldn't help myself 🤣)) had more trouble staying between the lines than others, so the number of penalties could be higher or lower.
Perhaps some drivers should be happy they did not get penalized MORE because there was some reasonable doubt when the stewards looked at the images!!!!
Hamilton could have scored 10 turns x 70 laps = 700 infringements all by himself, if all of those were valid he would have had at least 700 / 4 x 5 = 875 seconds penalty, let's say around 15 minutes...
On the Red Bull Ring that's roughly the same as being lapped more than 14 times... 🤔
That's what you get for complaining 😒😂🤣
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