The Formula 2 stewards issued two penalties after yesterday’s sprint race which revealed a new approach in how they handle races which finish under Safety Car conditions.
Ritomo Miyata was penalised for two separate incidents involving Dino Beganovic and Andrea Kimi Antonelli in yesterday’s race at Losail. However, because the Safety Car was still deployed when the race ended, the stewards chose not to issue a time penalty in either case.“As the race finished under Safety Car the stewards, using their discretion, determined that a drop of positions in the classification was more appropriate than the standard time penalty,” ruled the three stewards.
Miyata took the chequered flag in seventh place. As the field was running close together behind the Safety Car, a single five-second time penalty would have dropped him to 17th place. The stewards instead issued him a two-place drop in the final classification for his collision with Antonelli and four places for the Beganovic clash, leaving him 13th.
F2’s sporting regulations do not give stewards the power to penalise drivers a specific number of places in a race classification. The power is granted under the International Sporting Code.
The same is true of F1’s regulations. F1 uses different stewards to F2 during its race weekends and it remains to be seen whether they would change post-race penalties when races finish under Safety Car conditions in the same way.
Two F1 races have finished under neutralised conditions this year. The Australian Grand Prix ended under Virtual Safety Car conditions, where the gaps between cars expand rather than contract. The Safety Car was deployed at the end of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but no drivers had any post-race time penalties.
Last year Carlos Sainz Jnr was infuriated by his five-second time penalty in the Australian Grand Prix, which dropped him from fourth place to a point-less 12th, as the race finished under Safety Car conditions. Sainz tried to drop back from the car ahead of him and accelerate to the line at the finish in a bid to lessen the effect of his penalty.
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Kris
1st December 2024, 13:35
I like this idea.
Penalties should be fair and a 5 second drop often means losing zero or 1-2 places. Dropping 10 because someone else crashed is unfair.
John
2nd December 2024, 8:01
They also sometimes have no effect, if there are big gaps at the end of the race, or their teammate is behind them purposefully creating one. Which also isn’t fair.
Having any “unserved time” left at the end of the race be converted to places at some reasonable exchange rate (one spot for every few seconds) feels like it should turn into something “more fair” overall. Or maybe some kind of more complex conversion, like X seconds means you drop at least Y places but no more than Z or otherwise wherever the timed change puts you. There are probably some odd cases where it gets weird, but should be fewer than there are now.
Keith Campbell (@keithedin)
1st December 2024, 14:17
Been saying this for years. My concept was that a penalty imposed at the end of the race should be say the lower of 5 seconds or 1 position (or however many positions deemed appropriate for a 5 second penalty). I think that would also be fair in racing conditions, where a few cars could also be within 5 seconds, not just when behind a safety car, but either way this seems like a common sense decision. A 5 second penalty is the minimum penalty that can be imposed for a reason – it’s not intended to drop you from say a podium to out of the points because you were unlucky enough to finish the race behind the safety car.
MichaelN
1st December 2024, 14:54
The penalty given to Sainz in Australia last year was so bad. It was blatantly unfair and compounded by the fact that the stewards didn’t give any sort of penalty to no fewer than two simultaneous incidents that were far more consequential, i.e. resulted in straight up double DNFs. Of course one of them involved Gasly, who was on the precipice of a points-ban, which has often been a sort of ‘get out of jail free’ card.
But anyway. It’s good to see that a new approach is – finally – being pursued.