The continued difficulty Formula 1 has enforcing track limits was a bigger concern for Frederic Vasseur than the tyre problems or punishing heat the series encountered in Qatar.
In total during the 57-lap race there were 51 instances where lap times were deleted due to drivers exceeding track limits at nine of the Losail International Circuit’s 16 corners. As a result seven five-second penalties were handed out to four different drivers for track limits offences.During Saturday’s sprint race, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was among those who was penalised for exceeding track limits. His five-second time penalty cost him two points.
On a weekend when drivers suffered heat exhaustion and the FIA imposed strict limits on tyre use due to concerns over possibly failures, track limits concerned Vasseur most of all.
“Honestly, for me, the situation about the tyres is one thing, but I would say that the biggest issue for me of the weekend is track limits,” he said after the grand prix.
Following similar problems at the Austrian Grand Prix, where 83 lap times were deleted, Vasseur says F1 should have taken steps to avoid a repeat.
“You know when you are going to Spielberg that you will have issues with track limits and we had issues with track limits. You get the results two hours after the race. And when we came before the weekend, we told them exactly the same that it will be the festival. And it was the festival.
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“On the top of this, I think the drivers at the end perhaps they lost a little bit of concentration. Some guys, the last 10 laps, they were doing strikes every single lap. But you can’t blame them on this situation, it is that we have to find a solution.
“It’s not even good for the show. At least on the pit wall you have the number of strikes, you can follow the story, you know where you are and so. But I’m thinking about the guys who are in front of their TV. They don’t have the story about the strikes, and at one stage they see Gasly five seconds [penalty], Gasly ten seconds, Gasly 15 seconds. We have to think also about this, I think that we can anticipate this kind of issue.”
The Losail track was refurbished ahead of its second F1 race yet the new kerbs failed to prevent track limits being abused and also caused problems with the tyres. But Vasseur believes more than just the kerbs need to change to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s problems.
“It’s not just a matter of kerbs, it’s the complete process: The layout of the track, the kerbs, what is after the kerbs. We have to find a solution.
“I don’t want to go on and to speak about investment, but we are coming together, they are doing a mega effort to organise the event, and to have this outcome, for me it’s not at the level of the championship.”
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2023 Qatar Grand Prix
- Albon fears Qatar GP conditions risked creating dangerous “wet bulb effect”
- Alonso: New-spec fireproofs and pre-race anthem timing made Qatar heat worse
- Magnussen admits he took “too long to learn” Losail circuit
- Analysis: Sargeant’s Qatar radio reveals his painful struggle to end point-less run
- Alfa Romeo ‘finally understand their upgrade’ Bottas believes as team target Williams
Jere (@jerejj)
11th October 2023, 7:22
Maybe, but at least not as big as in Austria.
MacLeod (@macleod)
11th October 2023, 7:59
During the race (not sprint) all but 1 driver went off during a lap some multiple times in 1 lap. But notice the most off tracks were in the second part of the race. (due heat?)
The only driver who stayed between the white lines was Max Verstappen.
Lucky Milo
11th October 2023, 8:42
It’s not a track problem, it’s a driver problem so stop blaming the track
If it was a street circuit there would be concrete barriers all around the track
The drivers know hit the concrete & you may be lucky to escape, but more than likely it’s going to be the end of your race
So a solution could be to put concrete barriers on each corner or to save the teams so huge repair bills sensors could be installed in each car that will inform the driver they have exceeded track limits and will have to do a drive through stop and go penalty on the next lap or be disqualified.
It’s non discriminatory it could affect any car in any position from 1st to last, & if a driver is pushed off the track the stewards could override and reset the drivers notification
I’m sure even the fastest car/ driver combination would only exceed once before slowing down a couple of kph at the corner to avoid a 2nd penalty. Best part there would be no damage to the car or driver except maybe their pride
Andy (@andyfromsandy)
11th October 2023, 9:41
Agree. It appeared to me the reporting to the team was faster but it does need to be nearer real time, IMO. Technology needs to be employed between track, stewards, team, and driver.
S
11th October 2023, 9:43
You’d think so, but then there was Austria…. Where they even substantially reduced the penalties mid-race because so many people were driving off the circuit…
Certainly though, the driver’s interest in staying on the track is proportional to the consequences for going off it.
Nobody complains about track limits when a penalty of some sort is unavoidable (the traditional grass/gravel/walls argument) – they only ever complain when they have the opportunity to try to argue that they ‘can’t see the line’ or that they made no gains from leaving the track (the Austria/Qatar argument).
baasbas
11th October 2023, 10:07
@Lucky Milo
It is what you want it to be I guess. It is quite obvious now that the current approach yields these results. As seen here and Austria. Do track limits like this, then the result is a lot of track limit violations and deleted times and penalties all over the place. Is this a satisfying viewing experience? To me it isn’t, if you’re okay with it that is fine.
But I refuse to accept the argument it is a skill issue, or a driver issue. These drivers are the best of the best*. They’re actually groomed from an early age like those child violin masters to hone their racing skills. They have achieved insane amounts of experience, doing this for years and years. They work in the best teams with the best support driving the best cars. Still we get so many track limit violations. So they’re bad? Well, replace them all, race again and see you’ll get just as many violations with different drivers. It’s the way the game is designed, it’s not about the players.
Your example of barriers or a wall is a good one. A barrier has some plus points over just a line on a parking lot of tarmac. First and foremost: drivers can actually see a barrier WAY better than guess the exact position of a line from inside a batch tub peeking through a letterbox. Second, as strange as it sounds, a barrier has some grey area for a driver to cancel some of the effect of outside variables. A slight change of wind, a gust, an extra degree of tire or track temperature, some turbulent air from another car.. all can push a car 1 inch wider or not even if the drivers’ input is 100% the same over 2 laps. With the current approach, we’ll get a track limit violation. With a barrier they might tap or graze it. They’d lose time maybe, but they can keep the lap. Unless they make an actual mistake, then they’ll hit it too hard and receive damage.
For me it’s quite obvious a track problem, so stop blaming the drivers
*there might be a driver or 2 around who could need replacing.. but still, the point stands.
S
11th October 2023, 10:52
Clearly not, or they’d be staying on the track with no fear of any penalties whatsoever.
Of course it’s ‘the players’. No external person or rule makes them risk leaving the track. The game can (and is designed to be) be played without breaching any rules.
The only thing they need to do to stay within the lines, for their entire career even, is leave just a tiny bit of margin – take a tiny bit less risk. It’s a conscious decision they are making at every opportunity. It is on them and them alone.
The only significant contribution from any external factor at all is that the consequence for breaching track limits is simply insufficient to warrant competitors taking less risk.
An instant drive-through penalty for each offence would see them leaving that extra margin for error. However, a 5-second penalty for their 4th breach just encourages them to keep breaching, unless (or until) the penalty actually harms their competitive results.
The penalty for hitting a wall can be ending their race (and potential injury) – so naturally the walls typically get more respect than the white lines.
baasbas
12th October 2023, 8:42
@S
I see what you keep on saying, but your comments are based on the assumption that there are no variable outside factors in keeping a race car within the lines. I feel you’re comparing this with tennis, where you could apply the hawk eye system on the white line.
But to me that seems ridiculous because on the track we do have outside factors that can change from lap to lap.
Put a nice big fan in a hall. Turn it on and off randomly during the badminton game, or change the fan speed. Then blame the players for not keeping it within the lines.
And that is just 1 variable, with F1 there are more.
S
13th October 2023, 3:31
Nope. My ‘assumption’ (the actual fact) is that – regardless and inclusive of all external factors – it’s still the driver’s responsibility, as per the rules, to keep the car on the track (as defined by the white lines).
It would be a fair comparison because they, too, define their playing surface using white lines. And the Hawkeye system is only used for selected professional competitions, it is not a requirement to run the sport at all. No amateur or practice event uses it, all judgements are made by human judges – just as they have been in every other sport forever.
Why in a hall? If badminton were played outside, that’s exactly the kind of variable that would be a normal consideration that players make allowances for. When the shuttlecock is out, it’s out – it doesn’t matter why.
Remind me – where is F1 run? Outside, isn’t it?
The logical extension to your argument is that if a driver leaves no margin for error and gets ‘blown’ into a wall and sustains damage, they shouldn’t suffer the consequences of it.
Which sounds kinda silly, right? The car sustains a penalty because it left the track – why it left the track is largely irrelevant, unless it was pushed there by another competitor.
Other external factors are not accounted for in the rules, nor should they be.
Mark Zastrow (@markzastrow)
11th October 2023, 13:15
When we are saying, “Here’s a white line on flat road and if you go over it twice you’re disqualified,” it’s hard for me to recognize that as racing. Even if it “works” in the sense that drivers respect it, it reduces a challenge that is based on sensing one’s physical environment, its transitions, and its interaction with a machine and one’s own body in motion to something that is purely abstract with no physical risk to upsetting that motion.
Imagine if golf courses didn’t bother to grow rough and simply painted a white line beside the fairways, assessing a 50-yard distance penalty to their next shot. That wouldn’t be golf at all. A proper race track should force competitors to play their stray drives.
There’s been a lot of talk this week about how F1 drivers are heroes, and what makes them special. Well, I can’t think of anything that devalues those qualities more than race tracks that are mere painted lines in a car park. In a different context, Matt Bishop wrote that two of the ingredients that make F1 drivers special are “skill and courage”. I agree. And while coming ever closer to but not going over a white line requires increasing amounts of skill, there’s no marginal increase in courage.
I don’t need my F1 drivers to force themselves to stay in the car until they literally injure themselves from heatstroke. I’m not asking for concrete walls like Indianapolis. A strip of astroturf and gravel would do, probably. I just think that track owners that host F1 should be prepared to configure their circuits such that they enforce their own limits, not require increased monitoring from officials. And I’m glad to see it reported that Ben Sulayem thinks that, too.
baasbas
11th October 2023, 15:28
@markzastrow
Nice golf analogy. What I like about that is that if a player just barely overshoots and does end up in the rough, they’re still able to continue while having disadvantaged themselves.
MichaelN
11th October 2023, 10:47
They are not bad, as such, they’re making a risk/reward calculation.
There were only a few drivers that got penalized in the race; so most played it a bit safe, we’re warned perhaps a few times, and it was all good.
The kerbs can certainly be improved, but they’re currently very wide and the drivers absolutely feel it when their outer wheels start rumbling over them. Then there is still over 150cm to go before the inner wheels also leave the track. They are well aware of their lines.
baasbas
11th October 2023, 12:13
@MichaelN
They are not bad, as such, they’re making a risk/reward calculation.
That is it all in a nutshell. The reward could be up to half a second of lap time in that one corner, which is huge. Now if you absolutely send it through a corner right on the edge, external factors may push you wide.. or not. Let’s assume it’s a 50/50 gamble. And you have time for 4 tries in Q3. You’ll hope to make 2 stick and you’ll probably lose 2. That is a proposition all drivers then must take. Which will result in a lot of deleted times and a bad viewer experience (for me at least)
As long as going wider yields more time and the cut off is binary, we’ll be stuck with this. If going too wide results in time loss (like with a physical deterrent), then still some are going to nail it. But being just an inch too wide will result in a sub optimal time through that section… but there would still be a time on the board and as a viewer you don’t have all these deleted timed. And when a session is over, there is actually a reasonable chance that the final result is indeed final. Instead of Austria where the final result was 5 hours (!) after the race.
AlanD
11th October 2023, 19:09
Michael, your comment about risk/reward made me think about drivers in general. In the UK, we have a 70mph speed limit on motorways, and speed cameras are generally set to trigger at plus 10% okus 3mph, so a lot of people take that the attitutde that “the actual speed limit is 80mph”, so they routinely drive at 80. And then they complain bitterly if they get a ticket for doing 85, compalining they were barely speeding, they were unlucky because everyone else does it etc. They’ve lost sight of the real speed limit.
The white lines are a bit like that in F1. Drivers have forgotten they are supposed to stay inside them, believe they are entitled to three warnings, and if they can go over a line without it being spotted, that’s fine too. If a driver stayed inside the white line at all times, (and isn’t in a rocketship Red Bull), he would lose time to his competitors and he’d be criticised for not driving to the limit of what’s allowed.
If enforcement of track limits is physical, i.e. a concrete wall it is fair for all drivers. If enforcement is administrative, i.e. stewards jave to spot it and analyse the video and detect if they were a millimeter in or a millimeter out, that’s when it turns into an undatisfying experience for everyone.
Yaru (@yaru)
11th October 2023, 13:31
The solution is drivers need to drive more conservative and not breach the limit. Heavy car or not, you can’t keep at least one partial part of one wheel – again ONE PART OF ONE WHEEL – within the white line then maybe you need to up your game. You don’t have the right to be faster if it means not staying on track.
tvidovic
11th October 2023, 14:41
Exactly. If they would have taken the same amount of risk in Monaco as they seem to do in Qatar, we would be talking about 51 crash in the wall during the race. If they can drive less risky in Monaco, they can do it in Qatar as well.
baasbas
11th October 2023, 15:38
@tvidovic
..but we are talking about 51 crashes into the wall at Monaco, if you think about it. They’re not Perez-in-the-wall-in-Q3-crashes.. but just small track limit violations. I think if you would count how many times a tire grazes or brushes a barrier in Monaco the number would be way way higher. This year in particular in the wet. They were all over the barriers, way more than the white line in Qatar.
The thing is they’re about as careful in Qatar as they need to be. Most drivers have put in good Q laps despite losing some to track limits. Most drivers didn’t receive a penalty in the race, getting away with just the correct amount of track limit violations. It’s a risk vs reward calculation as MichaelN mentioned
AlanD
11th October 2023, 19:14
TVI, I think the other issue is that you can see a wall a lot better than you can see a white line under the rear wheels. If you brush the wall, you know exactly where you are. If you brush the white line, you fon’t get the same degree of feedback.
S
13th October 2023, 3:37
But they aren’t aiming to keep their car between the lines, they are aiming to take absolute maximum advantage of the additional 2 meters of space they allowed (the car’s width) – and inevitably, they’ll often get it wrong.
Where there are kerbs, they get plenty of physical and auditory feedback long before they exceed that 2 meters.