Renault’s Daniel Ricciardo was given two 5s penalties for his passing efforts in Sunday’s French Grand Prix. The Australian was trying very hard to take the fight to McLaren who had their Renault-powered cars ahead of Daniel and his teammate, Nico Hulkenberg at their home race.
Ricciardo had passed McLaren’s Lando Norris at the chicane, locked up and this put Norris is an avoiding action which sent him wide at the turn. As Ricciardo collected his car, he set about passing Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen but took the right-hand side of the track going into the run-off area in order to do so with all four wheels over the track limit line.
The race stewards viewed these as two separate incident and penalized accordingly:
“Ricciardo started to pass Norris on the outside at Turn 8. At the exit of the corner he distinctly left the track and the stewards determined that he rejoined at an angle that forced Norris off the track to avoid the collision.
“The stewards accepted Ricciardo’s explanation that when he was re-joining the track, he had slowed considerably, going down extra gears and locking up the front left tyre. He also stated that the rumble strips in the turn made the car more difficult to control.
“However, the stewards considered that the sequence of events constituted re-joining the track unsafely, and he subsequently took the position from Norris.”
The stacked penalties moved Ricciardo from the points leaving him down in 11th and McLaren best-of-the-rest at Renault’s home grand prix.
I can kind of see why they gave him the penalties, but geez, at this rate only DRS passing is allowed.
Total bullsh*t, worse than vettel’s. I realise what he did was outside the rules, but come on.
I watched the indycar at road America (first full indy race I have watched in my life on a road course) and they have stewarding much more lenient and the racing is better for it.
Ricciardo pushed Norris waaaay off the track, to the point that he lost three positions before he could get back on the racing line. That was way worse than Vettel in Montreal and absolutely a penalty.
Lando lost three positions because he had no DRS and his car was falling apart. Also DR didn’t push him off the track, he wasn’t near him as he rejoined the track.
Norris was hanging onto his positions just fine until he was forced off the track. Ricciardo was within about a foot of Norris when Norris had to jerk the wheel and leave the track to avoid a crash. He lost two of the positions while he was off the track, and the third during the corner exit that was severely compromised by being forced off. And DRS has nothing to do with it, he wouldn’t have gotten DRS until AFTER he had lost a position. Leading car doesn’t get DRS, only the trailing car.
The stewards are naturally going to be scrutinized more after Canada, regardless of whether DaniRic was in the wrong or not. My concern is the stewards at future races are going to be ‘strongly encouraged’ to address racing incidents in such a way as to protect the legitimacy of Vettel’s penalty in Canada instead of thinking for themselves and each incident as case by case.
“You want miracles? I give you the F. I. A.”