Palmer: Did Norris get a reasonable fine?

Jolyon Palmer, former Formula 1 driver and now an expert on the championship’s official website, discusses whether the fine imposed on Lando Norris at the Canadian Grand Prix was fair, even with the wording “for unsportsmanlike conduct”.

When George Russell’s crash at Turn 9 on Lap 11 of the Canadian Grand Prix brought out the safety car, the pack hadn’t had time to stretch and almost all the riders (and they usually started on medium-hard tyres) ) were ready to go into the pits to change tires.

Before the race, teams consider many different tactical scenarios and their variations, including scenarios where a safety car appears on a given lap.

But it is impossible to make an absolutely accurate prediction because you don’t know what position you will be in, which of the rivals will be there and what plans they will have, so strategists must be able to literally make decisions based on the go. But the most obvious decision was to go to the pits for a set of hard rubber, which could theoretically get you to the finish line.

As many did, the pit lane was a mess, with some teams making double pit stops, then unsafely driving the cars out of the pits, forcing the stewards to intervene.

They investigated two such cases. One between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso and the other between Lando Norris and Alex Albon. In the end, no one was punished.

The first case, due to Alonso’s actions, looked quite dramatic, as the Spaniard slammed on the brakes, maneuvered aggressively into the pit lane and also made a characteristic hand gesture as he radioed his displeasure with the team. Although in this episode the release of Lewis’s car on the track was in fact probably on the verge of a violation, in my opinion everything was perfectly calculated in Mercedes.

Hamilton left the pits ahead of Alonso and should have got back on track fairly safely before Fernando slowed down. Everything happened almost simultaneously and it makes sense that the stewards paid attention to this episode, but I believe that aggressively wagging the treacherous Alonso tried to get Hamilton fined. Unfortunately, such cases are becoming more and more common in modern Formula 1.

However, Alonso is also understandable, because he was stuck behind the Mercedes car for a long time, although his Aston Martin was capable of excellent speeds.

Analyzing the episode with Norris and Albon, the stewards found themselves in a more difficult position than in the case of the breakaway riders. Lando, leaving the McLaren pits, didn’t do too fast, putting his car very close to Albon’s Williams, whose mechanics acted very clearly.

Montreal has a narrow pit lane with crews of mechanics lining the track waiting for their cars, so Norris had a hard time getting out of the McLaren pits and was lucky that Albon slowed down to avoid contact.

If Alex hadn’t done this I think the cars could very well have collided and then the McLaren team would have been fined for Norris’s unsafe release, but I was a little surprised that Lando was not punished.

In such situations, the driver is usually warned of pit lane traffic and then you have to look in your rear view mirrors to see how close the other car is.

In such situations it is not at all the fault of the driver, but when the pit lane starts to quarrel, it is very difficult for teams to evaluate the intervals between cars, but usually they write a penalty of 5 seconds for this, which we quite see often.

In that episode Norris was lucky, but instead he was punished by the stewards for ‘unsportsmanlike conduct’ moments later. They felt that Lando had slowed down before entering the pit lane to give the team time to service Oscar Piastri’s car, as once the safety car was on track McLaren decided to make a double pit stop.

The driver has a rough idea of ​​which laps he can be called to the pits, but as soon as the safety car enters the track, he immediately starts thinking about the tactics of the race. Norris knew he was behind Piastri, so he played a subtle game of simply maintaining his pace on his way to the pit lane exit, exiting Turn 10, while he saw the cars of Charles Leclerc and Elex Albon following him. stopped.

Complicating the task for Norris was that when the safety car came out his McLaren was not far from the pit lane and he could no longer act more subtly. This forced him to slow down on the back straight, making his actions even more obvious.

Formally, the stewards qualified them correctly when they issued their verdict, but I’m surprised they decided to fine the rider, although such things happen regularly. At the same time, Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz did the same in a few cars behind him.

Sainz was only two cars behind his teammate, Charles Leclerc, when race directors released the safety car onto the track, and his initial reaction was the same: he slowed down and tried to create an interval for himself – this was before he realized that none of the Ferrari cars will not go to the pit stop.

Norris was penalized for driving too slowly, but Sainz actually braked to increase the distance to Leclerc’s car, who in turn had to slow down because of Norris. From my point of view, this just emphasizes the ambiguity of the stewards’ decision to penalize Lando – it seems to me that this is not entirely consistent and unnecessarily harsh.

Perhaps Norris was just unlucky in that situation, although on the other hand he was lucky not to be fined for the episode with Albon in the pit lane. One can only sympathize with Lando, who was pleased with several late overtakes that really graced the race, and was almost the only driver to regain positions during the Grand Prix, even as he got on the “DRS train” found.

The penalty saw Norris roll back from 9th where he finished to 13th earning no points. After the finish he was very upset, and you can understand him.

With more and more safety cars taking to the track these days, I’m sure there will be more situations like the one in Montreal in the future. Racers understand that they can only avoid wasting time in the pits if they act the same way. Overall, it will be interesting to see how the stewards will act after this Canadian story.