Hamilton and Leclerc disqualified from USGP
Hamilton and Leclerc disqualified from USGP
Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc have been thrown out of the results of the United States Grand Prix.
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Maybe I'm not reading that right or didn't catch it, but it doesn't sound like all cars' planks were checked during scrutineering. From the same document:
A physical floor and a plank wear inspection was carried out on car numbers 01, 16, 44 and 04.
So all the cars were subject to various inspections, but not all had the same things inspected. In particular, only cars 01 (VER), 16 (LEC), 44 (HAM), and 04 (NOR) were selected for plank wear inspections. And as such, only cars 16 and 44 were found to be out of compliance.
Am I understanding that correctly?
This is standard for how they do technical inspections. They can't check every rule on every car, so they check just a few important ones for every car (fuel, weight, etc) and then do random checks on a handful of cars each for others. The idea is to prevent it from being worthwhile to break the rule, while also requiring substantially fewer resources. That's probably also why the penalty is so steep: if it was a slap on the wrist that you had a small chance of being caught for, you might as well just always run out-of-spec.
That's a good take.
It’s fair, but if they’re finding cars fail the checks, then all cars on the grid should be checked for the same failure.
Is the time a limiting factor here? I read the results of 4 cars checks came 2 hours after the GP finished. Given we have night races that are followed up with FP1 less that 5 days later (following Friday morning), there possibly a logistics issue if doing those checks across 20 cars can’t be completed the evening of the race for any reason. Possibly isn’t just a headcount issue too if particular equipments needed? There’s time needed to ship the cars to other countries.
Watching Ted’s notebook teams are often well into teardown not long after the race ends, so perhaps losing a night becomes an issue for the back to back races.
I’m not sure to be honest, but just a thought.
No that’s a good point on the timescales that I hadn’t considered. Although I assume the planks detach - could they all be handed over the the FIA for testing at a later date?
I am guessing FIA mandates that no work be done on the car if it had been selected for random tests. How will you ensure it is the same plank if it is delievered well after the car has been disassembled
Most parts appear to have the irremovable/tamper proof stickers on with a serial number. Put one on the plank which is registered with the FIA. When it’s sent to the FIA after they’ll know if it’s the correct plank or not.
I seem to be in the minority here but isn't that a terrible waste of time? What would it achieve maybe 2 or 3 more disquals, fans are even more outraged. Doesn't seem like a productive use of time. The rules are the way they are to make it not worth it for teams to run out of compliance cars, if a team flies too close to the sun and gets caught then good, its working. The system did its job.
But then that’s like saying ‘we should only check track limits for 20% of the cars running’.
If the rules said that then yeah, but they don't. The rules do however say we will randomly check x number of cars for rule x on any given weekend and that's what they did. Are you suggesting the fia change the rules in the middles of a weekend in order to disqualify more cars? That would be an outrage.
No, I’m suggesting the rules are wrong to start with.