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.
In my opinion I don’t think a fix is necessary since this situation won’t happen often anyway.
What I see as a much bigger problem is the 5sec penalty. Because most if the time 5sec won’t actually change anything for the offender if they can just drive ahead 10, 15 or even 20 sec in a spread wide field. They should out harsher penalties like lost positions after end of race or maybe to get only half of the points if the finished position or something like that.