Pierre Gasly has reached nine penalty points on his licence again after picking up two for the second race in a row.
The AlphaTauri driver reached nine penalty points, three short of an automatic ban, at the previous race in Japan when he transgressed by speeding under a red flag. Two points he incurred last year then expired, putting him back down to seven.However Gasly picked up another two penalty points in today’s race. He is not due to drop any more until May next year, meaning he will begin the 2023 season with his new team Alpine with at least nine penalty points on his licence.
Gasly collected two penalty points in the Spanish Grand Prix for colliding with Lance Stroll, three more in the Austrian Grand Prix for colliding with Sebastian Vettel and repeatedly exceeding track limits, two in Japan and two today.
His latest penalty was for dropping more than 10 car lengths behind the Safety Car. After reviewing video and car position data the stewards concluded “it was clear from the evidence that car 10 was significantly more than 10 car lengths behind the car in front.”
The AlphaTauri driver was also given a five-second time penalty. The stewards deemed they failed to serve this correctly at Gasly pit stop as they raised his car from the ground too soon.
Gasly was one of six drivers to receive penalty points after today’s race. Nicholas Latifi collected two for colliding with Mick Schumacher, the stewards ruling he forced his rival off the track. George Russell was also given two penalty points for his collision with Carlos Sainz Jnr. The stewards said the Mercedes driver was “wholly to blame for the collision.”
Another driver involved in a collision, Lance Stroll, picked up two penalty points and a grid drop for the next race.
Two other drivers collected single penalty points. Schumacher received his for repeated track limits violations, the stewards noting he left the track “without a justifiable reason four times” during the race. Alexander Albon was given the same for leaving the track at turn 12 and rejoining while keeping his position ahead of a rival.
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Mike Davies (@nanotech)
24th October 2022, 1:07
Based on the replay, this was a pretty marginal penalty – feels more like retaliation for speaking out about Japan. Not normally an F1 conspiracy theorist, but compared to the other incidents that merited penalty points, this was a nothingburger.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
24th October 2022, 2:40
Perez was allowed to be more than 10 car lengths away twice before picking up a time penalty in Singapore. The excuse given by Race Control should have led to a red flag on the first occasion the conditions were felt to have prevented the gap. Gasly only had that gap because he went slowly round one specific corner and then couldn’t make up the gap due to the delta time rule (yes, there is one). So he was going to get a penalty either way, just because he took one corner at the speed he felt was right and it happened to be very different to the speed the car in front did so.
It also did feel like Race Control was picking at Gasly in particular – while track limits got exceeded quite a lot, I don’t think some of the people who were doing it got all their strikes counted. (Note “picking at”, not “picking on” – apart from the Safety Car gaps, I think Gasly unambigiously earned all his other penalties today). I want to believe that was unintentional bias from the Safety Car incident being first, which in a race where there was a lot of bad driving going on, is something that is very difficult to avoid.
Lance Stroll was hard done by, to my mind, because Alonso didn’t pull out an entire car width in the first place, meaning there would have been a collision whether Lance had chosen to defend or not. Thus, it was a mixed blame accident, which F1 has not been issuing penalties for in the last few years.
The other 4 things were either reasonable interpretations on the evidence provided, or things I didn’t see on the highlights reel.
NS Biker (@rekibsn)
24th October 2022, 5:58
Interesting that you spotted the overlap between Stroll and Alonso. That was my first thought when watching the on-board replays. It looked like even if stroll had not moved left, Alonso would have either hit him or wiped the branding off the side of the tyre.
Watching the on-board from the Aston Martin, it looked like Stroll did make a steering correction. Just wondering if the very close presence of Alonso caused the car to change direction. Somewhat similar to the incident last year with Bottas and Russel.
Pony
24th October 2022, 10:12
Seems like since Japan, the stewards have shifted their focus from Yuki to Pierre
Bleu (@bleu)
24th October 2022, 6:04
The penalty point system isn’t working well when considering that Gasly leaving too big gap is as serious breach as the collision caused by Stroll.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
24th October 2022, 6:36
This makes no sense as @bleu says. A penalty point should be given to serious offences, there are other mechanisms of penalizing people, which in the case of Gasly was a 5 second penalty during the race. How is leaving too big a gap with a car ahead during safety car conditions as serious an offence as Stroll causing a very dangerous collision in the middle of the pack?
Jere (@jerejj)
24th October 2022, 11:25
Surprisingly many infractions, unusually many for a single race.