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.
I thought it gave an interesting twist too. I guess I would feel different if I wasn’t a RB fan. Hard to say.
One other possibility comes to mind. What if there are no rule changes, but instead if the stewards think a team might try to take advantage of this, they decide at race time to hold their ruling disclosure until after the race?
Well, I personally don’t like stuff happening after the race. I rather have it during the race. But in your spirit of keeping it simple: if the stewards think a team has done something to evade punishment, they can consider the punishment not correctly served.