Question coming from a F1 newbie as of this year (thanks DTS)

Interesting race yesterday. Clever loophole exploitation on RB to put Perez back out to erase the time penalty. Supposedly F1 powers-that-be want to plug that hole so teams can’t do it again?

I guess the bigger question is should the loophole be fixed?

So how would such a rule be written? Say “if a car is out of a race under green for more than five minutes, the team must retire the car (which is defined as not permitted to race again in that race)”. But that doesn’t seem fair to a team in a race where less than ten cars are remaining (does this ever happen?) and it takes a while to get the car fixed.

Anyway, I am curious to see what becomes of this.

  • frank
    10·
    1 year ago

    To answer the part of your question regarding number of finishers: if you don’t count USGP in 05 (shudder), sub 10 finishers hasn’t happened since Monaco 1996, but only top 6 scored back then anyways (but only 4 did finish, so this is an example of a time when just finishing would score points). It’s very rare to have fewer finishers than points, I think besides the two I listed, these are the examples:

    finishers year GP

    5 1966 Belgian Grand Prix

    5 1968 Spanish Grand Prix

    5 1968 Monaco Grand Prix

    5 1970 Spanish Grand Prix

    5 1982 San Marino Grand Prix

    5 1984 Detroit Grand Prix

    Also some fuckery with the 1966 Monaco GP but that’s a long time ago and I’m not sure it’s relevant to your original question