SAKHIR, Bahrain — The FIA admitted fault for the delay in handing Nico Hulkenberg a track limits penalty in Q1 of Saturday’s Bahrain Grand Prix qualifying, which saw the Sauber driver progress to the next session with an illegal lap.
Hulkenberg went off the track at Turn 11 but his lap, which moved him from 16th into a position good enough to advance to Q2, was allowed to stand until the end of the following session.
Hulkenberg had already set a Q2 lap time when his Q1 penalty was confirmed, which meant he dropped back down the order to 16th.
Williams driver Alex Albon was promoted to 15th retrospectively, meaning he should have taken part in Q2.
Williams boss James Vowles said the tardy penalty cost his team two cars in the top ten shootout.
“First of all it’s frustrating, because Q1 is ever-so tight now, you can see cars do three runs, the cars that are slightly better do two — that’s where we were. We didn’t get the best lap with Alex, but it was a top ten car today,” Vowles told Sirius XM after qualifying.
“Some of the laps, you can see from the FIA, they were very quick to respond on — Verstappen, Tsunoda — and typically their timeline should be seconds after it happens. Good question on why this one wasn’t because the impact is: brilliant, he’s moved behind us, but that’s of no bearing to the fact that we’re probably six to eight places out of position, and that hasn’t been corrected, and it won’t be corrected either for tomorrow.”
A track limits violation is when a driver puts all four wheels over a white line on the edge of a corner in a part of the circuit the stewards feel an advantage can be gained by doing so.
To do with the large volume of violations during a race weekend the FIA has a system likened to VAR in football, with a team monitoring incidents in real-time at a base in Geneva to support the stewards working on location.
Four hours after the conclusion of qualifying, the FIA offered an explanation, saying the three practice sessions leading into qualifying had led them to not monitor Turn 11 as thoroughly as needed.
Their statement read: “There are a number of track limit hot spots which are monitored continuously live. Track limit hot spots are given precedence. Based on previous sessions, Turn 11 was not deemed to be an area of focus for track limits. In hindsight, it should have been higher on our priority list as a corner.
“Checks in areas of the circuit such as Turn 11 take a bit longer than those of a high priority.
“Unfortunately, in this case due to the timing of the check it was not possible to act before the start of Q2. As soon as we became aware of the incident, we acted on it.
“We are building towards increased resources and improved systems and processes. On this occasion, we got it wrong.”
Source: espn.com