04/07/2023
NEWS STORY
McLaren boss, Zak Brown has warned that there must be no repeats of the track limits fiasco which left the result of the Austrian Grand Prix in doubt over five hours after the race.
As the flag fell on Sunday, it was business as usual in terms of the post-race ceremonies, celebrations and commiserations.
However, at Aston Martin there was concern that despite the numerous penalties applied during the race a number of violations hadn't been mentioned allowing the drivers to get away scot free.
As a result, at 17:58, just over an hour after the provisional result had been released, which was around 25 minutes after the race ended, the Silverstone outfit protested the result.
As the media pondered what exactly the team was protesting, at 18:13 the stewards confirmed that they had become aware of the existence of a number of deleted laps
(due to exceeding track limits) that were drawn to their attention after the receipt of the protest, and had requested Race Control to perform a reconciliation of all deleted laps with penalties applied, noting that there were in excess of 100 deleted laps during the race.
The hearing was scheduled for 18:30 and at 19:47 the stewards confirmed that an examination of the list of deleted lap times provided to them by Race Control, revealed that a number of track limit infringements had not previously been referred to them for potential penalties.
Furthermore, it was determined that some of these infringements warranted a penalty that was not previously applied when the provisional result was published and would be reflected in the final classification.
At 21:30 it was confirmed that 8 drivers had received penalties for a total of 12 violations, with the final result issued 15 minutes later.
It was not the sport's finest five hours.
"We can't have it again," warned Zak Brown. "We can't have a race and five hours later you have that degree of change and penalties.
"It definitely wasn't ideal, that's stating the obvious, but it has no long-term impact because I don't think it will ever happen again.
"I've never seen anything like that before," he added, "so I don't think this is something that is an ongoing issue at other race circuits. I think it was specific to that one, so I think we need to look at how do you fix that?"
The American pointed out that officials ha known there was a problem since Friday's qualifying session, but had seemingly done nothing to sort out the situation, the failure to act following the early warning signs reminding him of the infamous United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis in 2005.
"I think where we need to do better as a sport is we all kind of thought what happened on Sunday could happen and yet we just kind of watched it happen. What we need to do is make sure it never happens again and that we do a proper debrief and understand how we could have prevented it in the first place or handled it differently."
"Everybody is in the worst possible situation with the regulations," said Toto Wolff. "The race director and the FIA try to enforce them to the best of their ability with the cameras and the sensors. We do the same with someone looking at the on-boards back at base, just to make sure we are not penalised more than all the other teams.
"But for the fans, spectators, teams and drivers it is super frustrating to keep the penalties coming.
"There are only two solutions, either you come back to sausage kerbs that break the drivers and the cars but then no one should complain, or you remove them all and let them race the fastest line, this is what Niki Lauda always said.
"You may come close to some of the guard rails, but we need to find a solution for the interest of the track, which is a super track and a traditional track.
"We want to achieve the same, a spectacular race that is not influenced by penalties unless they are given for the right reasons because the rules exist."