芝加哥商业交易所edes explain bizarre detail behind Lewis Hamilton track limits penalties

Henry Valantine 05年7月2023年7:00 PM

Lewis Hamilton exits Turn 4. Austria June 2023.

芝加哥商业交易所edes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained that the team were unable to inform Lewis Hamilton of his warnings for track limits breaches in Austria until it was too late, because the FIA messaging system could not keep up with how many lap time deletions there were.

Hamilton was one of seven drivers to be given in-race time penalties for breaching track limits too many times during the Austrian Grand Prix on Sunday, before an extensive list of post-race penalties were given when Aston Martin launched a protest into the result of the race.

Hamilton was then one of eight drivers given a further penalty for previously unnoticed track limits breaches, with a further 10 seconds being added to his race time and seeing the seven-time World Champion drop a place.

Understeer for Lewis Hamilton contributed to track limits issues

The Mercedes driver was complaining about his car’s handling during the race, to a degree that saw team principal Toto Wolff come onto team radio and urge his driver to get on with the job of driving.

Given the issues Hamilton had behind the wheel, trackside engineering director Shovlin was able to shed more light on why he was struggling to get to grips with the underperforming W14 at the weekend.

“If you were watching the race, you may have heard him talk about understeer in the high-speed corners and some of the very fast corners are at the end of the lap,” Shovlin explained in Mercedes’ post-Austria debrief.

“The problem with understeer is when you carry the speed in, you haven’t really got the ability to tighten the line if you need to.

“The simple issue for him was the combination of the nature of the corner and the kerb.

“The fact that he had this balance issue where the car wasn’t turning strongly enough as he wound the lock on meant that on a number of occasions he just ran wide, just drifted over that line and ultimately, that was what caused the penalty.”

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After Aston Martin’s protest of the results of the Austrian Grand Prix, the FIA ran through more than 1,200 instances of possible track limits breaches that were not looked at during the race, resulting in post-race penalties for eight drivers, including Hamilton.

Esteban Ocon of Alpine was the most-punished driver, with a total of 30 seconds added to his race time with four separate penalties coming his way, but the way the situation was handled has been widely criticised, as the investigation and final results were only published five hours after the chequered flag dropped at the Red Bull Ring.

Shovlin did not disagree with the rules themselves, but explained that Mercedes were unable to inform Hamilton of his transgressions in time because of how many drivers were going off track, which in turn slowed down the FIA’s messaging system during the race.

“It’s clear what the rules were, and it was clear that Lewis on a number of occasions had not kept one of his wheels on the track. That was why we were accumulating those penalties,” Shovlin added.

“The issue was though, so many drivers were accumulating them early in the race that the messages weren’t coming up on the FIA’s messaging system quick enough for us to be able to inform Lewis.

“By the time those messages were actually clear, and we were relaying them to him, he had actually got enough incidents to be able to be given that five-second penalty that he served in the pit stop.

“And then the added issue when there was the protest and they reviewed it, was that there were further ones.

“On the later ones the penalty keeps going up and up which meant that he had to take that 10-second penalty in the final race result.

“It is a situation that should be looked at. It was too much of a feature of the race there and it is a great circuit that the drivers enjoy driving.

“They shouldn’t feel that they are having to tiptoe around without making a single mistake. It is something that we will look at but as a team we are very happy to get involved in the conversations there, hopefully finding a better solution for the future races.”