George Russell, Williams, Istanbul Park, 2020

Russell also given five-place grid penalty for yellow flag breach

2020 Turkish Grand Prix

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George Russell has become the second driver to receive a five-place grid penalty for failing to reduce his speed sufficiently for yellow flags.

The stewards ruled Russell “did not have his car fully under control” as he passed Daniil Kvyat when the AlphaTauri driver spun off at turn two during Q1.

After speaking to the Williams driver and examining video and other evidence, the stewards penalised Russell and gave him three penalty points on his licence, taking him to a total of six.

“Car 63 [Russell] approached turn two, which was under double yellow flags for car 26 [Kvyat] who was spinning off track on the outside of the turn.

“While Car 63 made an attempt to slow when encountering the double yellow flags, in the opinion of the stewards he slowed insufficiently and did not have his car under full control as he approached and then passed Car 26.

“This lack of full control clearly breaches the regulations. The driver also set a meaningful lap time on this lap which in and of itself breaches the requirements set out by the race director’s notes.”

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    Keith Collantine
    Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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    6 comments on “Russell also given five-place grid penalty for yellow flag breach”

    1. This doesn’t impact his grid position, though, as he was already set for 20th on the grid due to exceeding the respective allocations for ICE, TC, and MGU-H.

    2. These are the sort of decisions that seem really stupid to me because they don’t actually have any impact at all on the driver that caused the infringement (since he was going to start at the back anyway). Surely they should sometimes use some common sense and carry over the penalty to the next race so it may actually have an effect? I know he still gets the penalty points but the grid penalty is inconsequential.

      1. @t1redmonkey

        That’s why they gave him three penalty points.

    3. So that means the strike of Russell over his team mates comes to an end?

    4. @bilarxos Russell would have started behind Latifi anyway due to his power unit penalty, but I believe these qualifying statistics are based on qualifying time, not starting position. Without checking I suspect there may have at least one race last year where he started behind Kubica.

    5. So the first driver behind Latifi and to get the double yellow gets the penalty for being the slowest of the remaining cars? How about Ricciardo, Sainz, Gasly and who else were behind that went way faster. A third sector can’t salves that much and they had a longer 2nd sector.

      Makes no sense.

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