Daniel Ricciardo, McLaren, Monza, 2021

Aston Martin and Alpine fined over pit lane incidents in qualifying

2021 Italian Grand Prix

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The Aston Martin and Alpine teams have each been fined €5,000 after their cars were involved in potentially unsafe incidents during qualifying at Monza.

Both incidents happened within moments of each other as several drivers left the pits at the same time at the end of Q2.

Aston Martin released Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll’s cars at the same time, while Lewis Hamilton was passing in his Mercedes. Vettel therefore moved into the fast lane, causing Hamilton to swerve in avoidance.

“Several cars were released into the pit lane at the same time,” the stewards noted. “The driver of car five [Vettel] was released by his team, but at the same time the team’s other car was also being released.

“This caused car five to move towards the fast lane when car 44 [Hamilton] was passing and car 44 had to take avoiding action to avoid an incident.”

The group of cars then approached the Alpine pit where Esteban Ocon was being released. The crew member guiding him out stepped backwards into the fast lane in front of Vettel.

“While the stewards accept that members of other teams also stepped this far into the pit lane, they did not obstruct another car and were not in a particularly dangerous situation,” the stewards noted. “In the case of car 31 [Ocon] the stewards determined that this was an ‘unsafe act’.”

Neither team managed to get either of its drivers into the final round of qualifying.

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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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8 comments on “Aston Martin and Alpine fined over pit lane incidents in qualifying”

  1. Something has to be done about this..

    5000€ is a wink on the wrists.

    There should be penalty points applied to their WCC tally once team exceeds some threshold.

    Also drivers driving ultra slow on their outlaps… Terrible as hell.

    1. Someone will get killed but the FIA don’t care, its been happening for several years now and it makes the sport look far more embarrassing than Spa did

  2. The out lap traffic jam is, as Brundle would put it, an aircraft crash waiting to happen. If the FIA don’t do something about it it’s only a matter of time before a driver or marshall is seriously hurt.
    As for the put lane nonsense – that’s nothing should of stupid. The penalty for such blatant disregard for safety should be loss of world championship points.

    Such things make me absolutely livid.

  3. 5000€…. is this a joke?

  4. Just have a top ten one lap shootout.

  5. But driving at 50mph when others are driving at 215mph is fine apparently.

    Ban the drivers, simple, because they are intentionally trying to kill someone

    1. Christian is that you?

  6. Why are they driving so slow anyway? These are the same drivers that claim f1 cars can’t follow each other.

    Hypocrites the lot of em

Comments are closed.