Red Bull will not appeal stewards’ decisions as Hamilton avoids grid penalty

2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

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Red Bull will not appeal either of the stewards’ two decisions which saw Lewis Hamilton avoid a grid penalty for incidents which occured during final practice.

Hamilton was given a reprimand and Mercedes a €25,000 fine for impeding Nikita Mazepin during third practice for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

During the Saturday session, held at dusk, Hamilton was driving slowly through the first sector when Mazepin came up behind him at turn seven. The Haas driver had to back off and drive over the kerbs into the run-off to avoid a collision at turn eight.

After investigating the incident, the stewards decided that Mercedes had not informed Hamilton early enough fashion that Mazepin was approaching.

Hamilton was also cleared of failing to slow for double waved yellow flags after the stewards ruled no such flags were shown.

The FIA stewards extended the time limit for parties to lodge an appeal over the Mazepin incident, as the verdict was announced during qualifying and further video footage released around the same time.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner originally indicated they would consider lodging an appeal. “We’ll have a good look at it,” he told Sky, comparing the yellow flag incident to the five-place grid penalty Max Verstappen received in Qatar. “It feels a little inconsistent with what we’ve seen two weeks ago.

“So we have the right to an appeal. We’ll have a look at the information – we hadn’t looked at it that closely.”

“These decisions are so late,” he added. “The team manager and their team have to focus on the qualifying. So we’ll have a look and see if there’s anything that’s untoward. The one thing that we desperately want is just consistency.”

However following Horner’s comments RaceFans learned Red Bull will not appeal the decisions.

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2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

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Author information

Ida Wood
Often found in junior single-seater paddocks around Europe doing journalism and television commentary, or dabbling in teaching photography back in the UK. Currently based...
RJ O'Connell
Motorsport has been a lifelong interest for RJ, both virtual and ‘in the carbon’, since childhood. RJ picked up motorsports writing as a hobby...

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13 comments on “Red Bull will not appeal stewards’ decisions as Hamilton avoids grid penalty”

  1. Any news on whether Bottas will face any action for hitting Raikkonen?

    1. @tflb Just a misunderstanding, neither was at fault alone, so penalizing would be unworthy.

      1. It was not smart of Bottas to go off his line when Kimi just past him.

  2. A wise move. Appealing for a non-infringement would’ve been foolish.

  3. bias misleading article omitting that Lewis did not get waved white flags from the incompetent marshals. So how did Lewis “AVOID” a grid penalty when no grid penalty worthy infractions was committed?

  4. What else Red Bull are willing to appeal? Perhaps, Hamilton’s hard breathing behind the wheel or Hamilton’s visit to toilet in the morning? :)

  5. Better not to appeal too much (for both sides), as in the end F1 might earns the reputation that it is an appealing sport, but not by the word’s best meaning.

    1. Instead of, these wealthy manufacturers could be obligated to pay some millions / team to help the stewards’ job with modern software and hardware. In the AI part Amazon could help, instead of creating some arbitrary graphics. They have everything to do so.
      And they could be obligated to speak to the stewards in a much more respectful tone. There would be a data engineer to help the stewards job as well, who could find/extract the appropriately useful “new evidences” from the telemetry data, what should be accessible for the stewards/scrutineers at about on the fly. It is quite bad that instead of this they have to wait a lot just to download footages of some camera for a super long while.

      Ok, I understand that from the car it would be problematic to live broadcast the images of all of the cameras fitted, as an F1 car is not a satellite truck. But they have talked about on million data points/sec quite much before. If it would be available and not just a rotund saying, then the incidents could be rendered and replayed from any point of view and the data could be analysed in the stewards’ room.

      Honestly I would oblige the manufacturers to pay for that, if they want to talk about rotund things like anti dilution, road relevancy, future, professionalism and so on.

  6. This is one of those seeing ghosts moments.

  7. So getting flak for not appealing. Interesting fans for Lewis.

  8. I have an opinion
    5th December 2021, 0:05

    Red Bull had no involvement in these incidents or the stewards’ decisions thereof. How could they appeal?

    1. They got Lewis a harsher penalty beofre by appealing double waved yellows I think – so they have form.

  9. Why appeal when you can nu ke Brackley?

Comments are closed.