At the end of a triple header, and before a two weekend break, we had the classic high-speed
Monza race for the Italian Grand Prix, and it was pretty interesting. No surprise debut
winner this time around but interesting. And let’s hit off this weekend’s talking
points with some chat about penalties. Some people seem pretty annoyed about how they work,
some a little bit less bothered. And we’ll get into that but first let’s go
over just how this qualifying result transformed itself into this grid.
The funny thing is, after qualifying, journalists were all rushing to tweet out what they believed
to be the final grid after penalties and there was no particular agreement among them,
perhaps demonstrating either the current system being slightly complicated or maybe
them tripping over their own haste. WHOS TO SAY But actually it’s not that complicated. Let’s go
over the many penalties. So, in order:
Tsunoda got a ten place grid drop for accumulating 5 reprimands. But that soon became moot because…
Tsunoda then got a 20 place grid drop for taking on 4 new elements (each worth 5 places,
because they were not the first illegal power unit change of each of their elements). This
pushed Tsunoda over 15 grid place drops, so his penalty becomes “back of the grid”
Perez changed to his 4th combustion engine, so a ten place drop for him
Bottas changes three elements, leading to a 15 place drop
Verstappen changed to his 5th combustion engine, for a 5 place drop
Hamilton breached his power unit limit across four components - a 40 place drop so that,
like Tsunoda is ‘back of the grid’ Tsunoda then got a 3 place grid drop
for failing to slow under yellow flags. Again, moot because he’s already “back of the grid”
Carlos Sainz took 4 new elements so that’s also ‘back of the grid’
Magnussen took three new elements of components already breached, so that’s a 15 place drop
Ocon took a fifth combustion engine for a 5 place drop. Almost done, I promise.
Schumacher took a fifth combustion engine for a 5 place drop
And Schumacher also took a couple of extra gearbox components, giving him a additional 10 place drop,
so fifteen places in total. Right, so how does this all play out?
Well, look, all the “back of the grid” people, we can just ignore for the moment. They’ll be
joining the back of the grid in the order they qualified in once the actual numerical
penalties have been sorted So we clear Sainz, Hamilton
and Tsunoda out of the way. Then we just see what the
penalty is going to be for each driver. So Verstappen has a 5 place so he’s going to
drop from 2nd to 7th Perez from 4th to 14th
Ocon from 11th to 16th Bottas from 12th to 27th. I know,
it’s temporarily a bit weird, but bear with Magnussen and Schumacher drop to 34th and
35th but just for the moment. Because now we have all these
gaps and everyone has to slide up until people can take their penalties.
So everyone from Russell in 6th to Alonso in 10th can slide up five places until Verstappen can
slot into his penalty position of 7th. Cool. But now we have a big gap again So everyone
from De Vries to Stroll slot up to fill all the places from 8th to 12th.
And now we’ve run out of non-penalised people. So now the normally penalised people – Perez,
Ocon,Bottas,Magnussen and Schumacher slide up in the 13 to 17 grid slots.
And THEN the ‘back of the grid’ people fill out the final places, in the order they qualified.
So. Yes, it was pretty
complicated and I can see why journos made a bit of a pig’s ear of working it out. It helps to be
able to slide the names around like we did and work through the algorithmic process of applying
the penalties. But it does kind of make sense, it just… gets very messy when you’ve got nine
drivers sorting out their penalties all at once. One thing to note, which is something Sean at the
F1 Word said on the post race discussion stream he had me on for: this isn’t a very common
occurrence, having such a flurry of penalties Belgium and Italy are key parts of the season
for getting new power unit parts in for the end part of the year. Power tracks,
possibilities for overtaking maybe. Setting yourself up for the remaining fly aways.
Most of the time you’ll see drips and drops of penalties here and there.
So is it a massive problem that occurs so often we need to rush to fix it? Maybe not.
But I agree it is complicated AND I agree that (outside of maybe being
complicated when nine penalties happen at once) it has two big negative effects:
The first: we’ll be watching qualifying knowing that the results they’re fighting
for with their hot laps are not the grid positions we’ll see on Sunday. That’s a
bit annoying. And it was particularly annoying at Monza where basically all the front runners
bar Leclerc were penalised. So it was an obvious Leclerc pole, barring any blunders.
The second: sometimes people don’t get the proper penalties accrued. For example,
Magnussen had a 15 place penalty for using 3 extra components but actually started 3
places up on his qualifying position. Perez took a smaller penalty than was given him,
a 9 place drop instead of a 10 place drop. Circumstance can diminish the penalty,
especially if you’re starting further down the grid, and getting a penalty encourages you to just
chuck more engine parts at the car, blowing your limit as much as possible because once you reach
15 places you may as well go the whole hog. And this isn’t really in the spirit of
trying to limit people’s power unit use is it? Some say maybe we should increase the power unit
limit a bit. And maybe we should, but I’m going to run with the assumption that the sport really
wants them to limit their use. That this is an important part of cost saving and sustainability.
So what alternatives are there? Well, you could include power units under
the cost cap, so the extra manufacture and use of power unit parts is hard limited by your spending
allowance, and means taking on new engines affects the entire operation. That’s one way of doing it
There was some talk of subtracting a percentage of points from teams or drivers every time an illegal
unit is used but that also gets complicated and means determining a champion is much harder.
For example, Max COULD win the title at the next race in Singapore as it stands. And
I’ll get into that in a bit. But if a rule was in place that deducted points for extra
engine use, we wouldn’t know the final points tally until we knew how many engines he’d used.
If he takes an engine after Singapore after he’d “won the title”, that could
bring Leclerc back into contention again at a later race. That’s complicated and annoying
and means teams can’t celebrate until all the technicalities have been taken off the table.
I thought about what I’d do, and if I wanted to make an equal and effective deterrent from
rinsing through power unit components I would assign a race time penalty for
every component used over the limit. So, you know how if you have a five
second penalty in the race you have to take it in the pitstop, where the team have to
wait five seconds before working on the car? Now I don’t know what numbers would work best
but say there was a ten second penalty for every component used over the allowed limit. So instead
of starting the race with a five place grid penalty, you start with a ten second time penalty
that you know you’ll be facing later in the race. Again, it doesn’t have to be ten seconds,
it could be more or less depending on how much of an incentive you want to give the
teams to make robust, reliable power unit parts. But, the important part is it’s always a proper
penalty, it’s always equal no matter what team you are, where you start the race or how many
other people take penalties, and they will accumulate properly. So you can’t just change
everything for free. Every component is a penalty. And again, you just need to stick a graphic on the
timing tower showing their penalty at the start of the race until they take it. Everyone starts on
the grid slot they qualified in. Everyone knows the time penalties they need to overcome,
and they can maybe adapt their strategy around it. It’ll be fair, interesting and
good incentive to make good engines. That’s my idea. What do you think?
So that was my main point of discussion for Belgium but I’m going to briefly go over a
couple of other things. One: how we felt about that safety car finish, and two: a quick look at
when Max can wrap up this title, mathematically. So, that end of race Safety Car then. A lot of
people seemed pretty unhappy with it, feeling it had brought the race to an anticlimactic
finish and there should have been a red flag and a restart, or that things should have moved along
more quickly to get a last racing lap in. So a couple of things. First, the race was
absolutely won by Verstappen. He was 17 seconds ahead of Leclerc when the yellow flags came
out for Ricciardo. Without Ricciardo’s crash, the only action on track really
was the battle for 8th and the battle for 13th. Secondly, it’s important to note the race was run
according to procedure. The stewards communicated with track staff about the state of Ricciardo’s
car. They tried to move it, but couldn’t and eventually had to call a tractor. There was
no debris across the track, so the stewards felt it was suitable conditions for safety
car running. And ultimately, there wasn’t time to get the track back to to green flag running.
If this had happened on lap 10, things would have been identical. As it should be really,
we don’t want race directors bending the way things are done on a whim for the sake of
entertainment. That would never happen. This is editing me poking in to say the
Safety Car did erroneously pick up Russell instead of Verstappen and went almost 3 laps
before releasing Russel and ten other cars to correctly pick up Verstappen, adding to the delay.
The only thing I will say, and I’ve said this before: I don’t like tractors out on
track craning off cars while the racing cars are still running, safety car or not. I know
the stewards think it’s safe and under control but I’m not a fan and for that
reason only I would have encouraged a red flag. Now, I think the question of whether they followed
procedure is clear. The follow up question is: do we want to change what the codified procedure is,
in the case where Safety Car conditions occur in the last 5 or 6 laps of a race?
Do we want the FIA to set up a system that encourages proper racing across the final laps?
Bear in mind, Safety Car finishes are very rare so it’s not something we need to worry about
too much. But if you wanted to get green flag running to the end, you could simply
automatically red flag the race instead of pulling a Safety Car if the race has, say, 5 laps left.
You could then ban tyre changes under these specific red flag conditions, and mandate a
rolling restart. This way you get the equivalent of a Safety Car restart without all the laps
wasted away and ending the race under suspension. Now I don’t care too much about this. Like I said,
it’s very rare, but if you wanted to do it, that would be the fair way of doing it. Because it
would be functionally identical to running a Safety Car, with the ability to restart.
Now, a quick look at the title race ahead. Currently the gaps in the drivers’ title are
as follows. So Verstappen has a 116 point advantage over Leclerc, his nearest rival.
There are six races left, Singapore, Japan, USA, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and
Abu Dhabi. All of which offer 26 points, except Brazil which offers 34 because of
the Sprint Race offering 8 place for a win. So the maximum amount of points available
from these next 6 races is 164 points. This means that Lewis Hamilton is mathematically
out of contention, with a gap of 167 points. But the top 5 are all still in it currently
However, after Singapore there are only 138 points up for grabs. So if Verstappen can pull a gap on
Leclerc of 138 points or more, he will win. So we just subtract these existing gaps from
138 and see Verstappen needs to outscore Leclerc by 22 points and outscore Perez by 13 points
and outscore Russel by 6 points to clinch the title. So it’s a bit of a big ask to achieve,
but Singapore has high attrition and Max winning with other retiring is … a possibility.
Now, for Sainz to stay in it he actually has to outscore Verstappen by ten points in Singapore.
We’ll see how it all plays out and revisit it in 3 weeks after Marina Bay, eh!
Thanks again for watching and have a lovely two weekends off from F1. Six races to go.