The Russian Grand Prix stewards have explained why Stoffel Vandoorne has only been moved back one place on the starting grid despite incurring a five-place penalty for a gearbox change.
Vandoorne came 19th in yesterday’s qualifying session but originally moved up to 14th on the grid due to five drivers in front of him being sent to the back of the grid for power unit component changes.This morning the stewards confirmed McLaren had fitted a new gearbox to Vandoorne’s car, incurring a five-place grid penalty. However he has only been moved back to 15th on the grid behind Lance Stroll.
The stewards ruled Vandoorne should maintain his position in front of those drivers who had been sent to the back of the grid for changing multiple power unit parts.
“Article 23.3b) of the FIA Formula One Sporting Regulations provides that if a driver incurs a penalty exceeding 15 grid positions in relation to power unit elements, he will be required to start from the back of the starting grid,” said the stewards in a note to teams.
“It further provides that if more than one driver receives such a penalty they will be arranged at the back of the grid in the order in which the offences were committed.
“However, Article 35.2c) provides that grid position penalties be applied in the order the offences were committed.
“This could lead to a situation where a driver who was not part of a group of drivers required to start from the back of the grid, could incur a penalty (for example a change of gearbox) which placed him behind those required to start from the back of the grid.
“We do not consider that such a car which has replaced one power unit element or a gearbox, should be placed behind those who have had multiple changes.
“This is consistent with the situation that applied at the 2018 Italian Grand Prix, namely that all those cars which are required to start at the back of the grid will be treated as one ‘group’ and will always start behind the other cars, not so penalised.
“At the 2018 Russian Grand Prix, five cars incurred the penalty of ‘starting from the back of the starting grid’. They should therefore occupy the last five positions on the grid.
“Accordingly, the stewards determine the starting position of car two will be immediately in front of the group of five cars which are required to start at the back of the grid.”
See the updated Russian Grand Prix starting grid
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erikje
30th September 2018, 10:13
Brilliant.. stretch every rule to its max and invent new interpretations on your way.
Who said the penalty system was broken.. they just “fixed” it ;)
bosyber (@bosyber)
30th September 2018, 10:15
While it does show once again that these penalties lead to odd results, I think it is good the stewards decided that ‘back of grid due to 20+ penalties group is always put at the back with only internal rearrangements’ bit, helps make the results a bit less random.
Aapje (@aapje)
30th September 2018, 10:19
Ad hoc rules, the most fair kind.
Jere (@jerejj)
30th September 2018, 10:28
Interesting tactics.
Tommy Scragend
30th September 2018, 11:07
Makes perfect sense to me. To have Vandoorne starting behind a driver who was required to start at the back of the grid would have been nonsense.
Of course the whole penalty structure is nonsense already.
x303 (@x303)
30th September 2018, 11:28
That’s completely logical, yet some find ways to complain. One of the mysteries of the Universe…
krxx
30th September 2018, 12:10
Exactly, completely logical. And no stretching whatsoever. Back of the grid VS 5 place.. But no mystery here: Most of the one’s complaining, are orange Max-FBoys. Anything/-one that ‘hurts’ him, they will attack.
erikje
30th September 2018, 15:24
The simple fact RIC was crushed this weekend ( and this season btw ) by his teammate seems to get to you.
Try snooker or another “easy” sport that is not to nerve wrecking for you ;)
RIC damaged his own wing by making the wrong moves when he was confronted with debris. He lost his start to Max ( who even had to avoid a stalled TR), he was not able to follow VER even after the wing was replaced ( and it was the only damage) he is loosing the quali battle with enormous differences, the points difference ( witch seemed so important for you before when RIC was leading) are growing. He truly is crushed, like RIC did with VET in their last year.
krxx
30th September 2018, 22:04
Heyyy, orange erikje, the delusional. Couldn’t stand to come to the rescue of dear old Max, could you?
With what kind of lies did you come up with now?
1) VER didn’t crush RIC at all this weekend, he only finished 1 place above him. After the initial start (lap 11 or 12) VER was around .5 to .6s per lap quicker, which is a big difference. However, the reason in the big difference of pace lied in the damaged car. I didn’t see how his wing got damaged, but if it’s by a fault of his own, then it’s his mistake and he paid for it. If it was a pure racing incident, he got unlucky. And if he got hit, even more so. What the case may have been, he only lost out to his teammate so it was the best damage limitation he could have done, only lost 2 points.
2) How desperate do you have to be to say that it was RICs own fault? Like I said, I didn’t see it, but neither did you, bc it wasn’t televised. Or do you have a link, may be from Max’ personal telvision network.. Can you say Ziggooooooo??
3) I’m truly LOLling all the way, every time you cling on this ridiculous thought that I’m a RIC-fan. How desperate and pathetic
4) How desperate are you to point out that VER avoided a stalling/slow TR? Have you never seen this before or what? This thing happens every season a couple of times without the other car losing speed, and without him ramming the guy in front, hahahah. You truly only started watching racing from 2015 onwards, and only from the back end perspective of Max, didn’t you?
5) Again, how desperate must you be to make up things and explicitly pointing out that there supposedly was no other damage than the wing damage? Even RB themselves can’t tell this immediately. And even if it turns out to be the only damage, so what, as if that wouldn’t be enough to explain the deficit in pace, hahahaha. Tool.
6) RIC is being crushed this season and losing quali with enormous differences, ahahahahha. Delusional. I’ll come back at this later, bc I already posted a reply
7) I’ve never claimed that points difference was so important. Not without context that is
8) Talking about being desperate. Claiming that RIC wasn’t able to follow VER after his pit stop while in fact the opposite proves to be true: a) When RIC came out of the pits he set his fastest lap of the race in his first true lap. Max did the same, 4 laps later. Delta: 0.062, in Max’ favour. So hardly significant
b) In total RIC did lose a bit more seconds in those last bunch of laps but that’s perfectly explainable bc he was lapping those last laps 3 or 4 seconds slower than he could have. He did this immediately after he cleared Stoffel, Sirotkin and Sainz so he could stay in clean air and realized he wouldn’t get to Stroll. The same thing did Max albeit not that extreme: he stayed within 1 second of his best lap when he was trailing and cleared Grosjean and Hulk.
So there you go, straight up REALITY versus ORANGE FBoyism: KO victory for REALITY, hahahahahhhahahhaaha.
And now the aforementioned encore, enjoy:
The first 5 were pretty straightforward with Max leading RIC 3 to 2 (though the gap in Australia was unusual big with a delta of over 0.27 in Max’ favour). T
here was Bahrain where Max didn’t get through q2 bc he crashed his vehicle bc he “had a sudden surge of 50 extra HP” in q1, so trying to calculate a delta is
pointless. I’m sure though that in some Max-FBoys’ book of stats this quali-battle was assigned a negative delta for Max, ie Max ‘won’ this battle by their
‘standards’, bc he did a faster lap in q1 than RIC.
Next stop Monaco. The weekend RIC dominated the field, all of the sessions and race. Yet he doesn’t get awarded the win in quali. Bc Max crashed his car alre
ady in FP3 and couldn’t participate in quali. So officially this one remains 0-0, yet in practice it was like the equivalent of a KO. Your idol got evidently
beaten on those two occasions, yet you still conclude with “.. even when he didn’t beat Verstappen on the track.” That’s delusional.
Around this time there was some criticism directed at Max bc of the 7 or so costly, big mistakes. Now Max did make some changes in his approach, though he fi
rst denied he had to do so. But what were the orange FBoys saying after Mon? “Max doesn’t have to change ish, he’s just unlucky and the rest, especially his
teammate, have been very lucky.” Delusional. Also, I said earlier that Max had been outperformed by his teammates in Monaco and provided data. The orange arm
ada immediately jumped on that like some colony of bees protecting their queen, denying the data and even claiming the opposite. But funny enough, within a w
eek or so, there was some article here in which Max was quoted he doesn’t like street circuits (he got beaten again in Baku too, in both quali and race) and
doesn’t want to have a street circuit GP in the Netherlands bc of it. Again, delusional (the FBoys).
The next three were VER-wins. Not much to it, bar the little controversy around the Austria-tow which set up Max’ lucky, only win.
Then came Silverstone. Gap: 0.5 sec. Unusual big. Outlier. Explainable? Yes, in his fastest run (which wasn’t his last btw), his DRS malfunctioned. RIC got ‘
lucky’ though, he started the race next to his teammate.
Then you had Germany and Italy in which RIC had a penalty, very much like they both have now. What did Max do in q2 now? Stay put. RIC too. He didn’t drive,
just like Max in Monaco. But these three quali-battles will go down, ‘officially’, as 2-0 in favour of Max, though the ‘proper’ way should be 1-0 in favour o
f RIC. VER didn’t participate in Mon-quali bc of his own fault, RIC didn’t participate in q2 (and thus q3) bc of tech issues and there was no point to.
Between Ger and Ita you had Hun and Bel. In Hun the gap was 5.3s. And you say it isn’t skewed.. Sudden form of loss of RIC? Motivational probs you say? Max i
n a class of his own you claim? No of course not. Actual reason: Stroll spun or crashed his car, flags were waved, RIC couldn’t finish his lap. When the sess
ion resumed, it was raining heavily. This quali-result in itself was responsible for much of the 0.7s average around the summerbreak, more than 70%. Yet the
oranges refuse to take this into account. Delusional.
Belgium was also a strange one. Red Bull gambled, and lost out in quali, by giving their drivers not enough fuel for a second run. The gap was within normal
range though, 0.17 in Max’ favour. It still should be given an asterisk though, bc it was a wet quali.
Then comes Singapore. A track Ric is no slouch at to say the least. Qualified and finished in 2nd or 3rd in the previous 4 years. Yet he gets blown away by V
ER with almost two thirds of a second. The same guy he beat by over two tenths of second in 2016 and only narrowly got beaten by in 2017 (0.026s). So there m
ust have been something up with the car. A gap that is a third bigger than at Silverstone, which in itself was already an outlier, due to a technical issue.
16 quali’s but only in about half of them you can assign a delta to them. Bah and Mon you can’t (Max being out of contention). Same goes for Bri and Sin (car
thingi’s RIC). Hun (unequal circumstances), Ger+Ita+Rus (penalties) are also obvious.
If you wouldn’t take these into account, you would get an average delta of about 1/8th of a second, so less than 0.13s, in Max’ favour. Less than 0.13s while
the ‘official’ delta would be over half a second. And instead of about 6-3 or 7-3 in favour of VER when it comes to duels, the ‘official’ standing says 13-2
I reckon. Both the 0.13s and 6-3 or 7-3 stat, are pretty much in line with their respective counterparts of 2017.
So there you have it. Throw in a lot of bad luck in quali for one driver (even more so in the races btw) and add a bunch of oranges that only accept stats, r
ulings etc in which their subject of worship gets the better end of the deal, you get a distorded, skewed view of what is really going on.
Encore part 2:
Let’s have a quick glance at the actualities after the summerbreak 2016:
2016: RIC 123 points VER 89 with 1 DNF through no fault of his own
2017: 200 with 6 DNFs, including HUN for which Max publicly apologized VS 168 with 4 or 3 DNFs plus Sin (racing incident), so at best, for you oranges I’ll b
e lenient, 5
2018: 134 (6) And that’s without the strange 0.7s deficit in Sin-quali, one of his best tracks – 158 (1or2)
So add them up: RIC 457 (12) VER 415 (7 or 8). So, not only has DRIC scored more points than your precious, he also had 50-72% more DNFs than Max had. Add to
these heartbreaking reality, I know it hurts, the horrible bad luck RIC has had in a couple of FPs and qualis this year, and the fact that RIC isn’t being i
nvested in by RB anymore bc he is leaving for Renault, and you’ll come to the conclusion that the only ones who have been defeated, are your boy and your ong
oing pathetic attempts to paint an orange, distorted, twisted version of reality, hahahahahahah.
Max’ 5th place today may be soothing a little bit, but don’t dig too deep, you might find something you won’t like, like the fact that RIC was driving a crip
pled car all race long.
Nighty nighty.
Muwahahahahahahaahhahahahahaha
Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
30th September 2018, 13:25
I still think literal grid penalties are the answer. Qualify 10th, get a 15 place penalty, start from the 25th grid box. Would also make you look a bit of an idiot too, which is fun.
I don’t care if it ends up round the previous corner. If in doubt, they only start when told to over the radio!