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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