After taking into account the circumstances of the incident that took place during qualifying, when Max Verstappen drove too slowly on the track and interfered with George Russell, the stewards of the Qatar Grand Prix fined him with the loss of one place at the start and one penalty point. on the way to his super license.
After hearing from Verstappen, Russell and team representatives and reviewing positioning system data, video recordings, timing, telemetry, team radio and video from in-car cameras, the stewards discovered the following:
The driver of car #1 (Verstappen) followed a different strategy than the driver of car #63 (Russell) and did not maintain the time delta. The driver of car No. 63 claimed he was sticking to the delta and did not expect to see car No. 1 on the racing line. He stated that if a car is traveling slowly in a high-speed curve, it should not be on the line.
The driver of car #1 did not follow the race director’s instructions and, in the opinion of the stewards, drove unreasonably slowly. It was clear that the driver of car No. 1 was trying to cool the tires. He could see the No. 63 car approaching when he looked in his mirror several times while on the short straight between Turns 11 and 12.
The incident unusually happened when neither car was on a fast lap. Had car #63 been on the fast lap at the time, a penalty of losing three positions at the start would most likely have been imposed, but in this case the driver of car #63 clearly saw car #1, and neither of them was in the fast lap.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
