Austrian Grand Prix | “It makes us look like amateurs”: the chaos of track limit violations

In 2022, it was a first, so it has become a habit since the drivers have done it again, in even more spectacular proportions, this year. There were 43 track limit violations last year at the Red Bull Ring – for four drivers penalized with a five-second penalty – and on Sunday, at the finish of the Austrian Grand Prix, the officials of the International Automobile Federation (FIA) had not yet reviewed all the contentious sequences…

At the end of a test without suspense on the identity of the winner – Max Verstappen (Red Bull) started in the lead and he only momentarily left the controls to the stoppage game -, concern is in order within the paddock because Spielberg lived for 71 laps only at the pace of the competitive off-road that the race director, the German Niels Wittich, had promised to repress with penalties like last year. According to a simple watchword: racing is on the track, not off it.

This had the merit of being clear, and the ninth round of the world championship provided proof that the teams had accepted the omen of it, if not provisioned for additions of 5 seconds to the race time of their pilots. After all, they are used to managing this kind of sanction through pit stop timings adjusted accordingly. This is exactly what happened on Sunday, in the mountains of Styria.

“We are lacking pace compared to our nearest rivals. I pushed a lot and eventually got a five second penalty due to track limitations, like other cars. That probably didn’t change the result. final”, concluded Pierre Gasly (Alpine), for whom the sanction had almost been a non-event, before losing a place in the evening. Nyck de Vries (AlphaTauri), also penalized a posteriori, confessed in the closed park : “I accept the penalty, we were just trying to find the limit, but luckily we built a sufficient gap not to lose any position.”

Just out of his car, Lewis Hamilton blamed his penalty on an uncontrollable Mercedes: “We knew we had poor rear end, so we took downforce (front) hoping to keep the car balanced. And we massively underestimated it. At turn 10, that was slipping and there was nothing I could do about it.” Slightly different justification, but in the same spirit for Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri): “I couldn’t hold the car within the limits”, pleaded the Japanese, handicapped by aerodynamic damage. A double jeopardy, in a way.

In short, in this story, everyone had a ready excuse, but the accumulation of announcements, which really polluted the screens and the live comments, made bad looks. Especially since the notifications, the final warnings (white and black flag) and the penalties arrived with more and more lag compared to the facts, despite the viewing support unit in place at the FIA, in Geneva. But again, that was without counting the second blade…

“I think we have to look at the issue of track limits, because it makes us look like amateurs”, had alarmed Christian Horner, the team principal of Red Bull, live on Sky Sports. He knows what he’s talking about: Sergio Pérez was out in Q2 on Friday, after three cancellations without remission. “So many good riders have breached these limits… It’s too easy (to get trapped). We have to fix that for next year”he demanded.

The return of gravel or high curbs?

“We need to discuss what we do in the futurehad agreed Toto Wolff, his counterpart at Mercedes, on Canal +. The race direction is doing what it can, but you need curbs that destroy the car so that you don’t go where you want. And the federal commissioners did not say anything else when drawing conclusions from the fiasco on Spielberg’s night: “We very strongly recommend finding a solution to track limitations for this circuit.”

Friday, after qualifying for the sprint studded with 47 lap cancellations, Helmut Marko, the Red Bull Racing adviser, had suggested putting gravel bins back on the hot spots – turns 9 and 10 – or slightly raising the curbs . Two infringements had been noted in turn n°6, and all the others in n°9 and n°10, at the end of the lap. With a double penalty for offenders at the last turn: the cancellation of the completed lap and the next.

As we know, the Red Bull Ring is the support of the Austrian Grand Prix of the MotoGP world speed championship, and it is to comply with the regulations of the International Motorcycling Federation that an additional strip of bitumen borders the track . But other tracks also play on both counts (Austin, Montmelo, Silverstone, Imola, Losail) without falling into this caricature.