IN a race littered with stewards’ decisions, one crew in the Bathurst 6 Hour has received a staggering 15-lap post-race penalty, with the Volkswagen Golf Type R of Cem Yucel and Iain Salteri demoted due to a driving time breach.
Salteri was adjudged to have exceeded the permitted three-hour continuous driving time, a core rule of the event that had to be balanced against a maximum total time of 3.5 hours per driver during the race.
The Stewards’ Decision on the matter alleged that Salteri’s stint lasted some 3hr10min46.3080sec, with 5 laps deleted from a car’s total for each 5-minute time block exceedance, or part thereof.
The crew were on track for a class A1 podium until suffering a flat tyre halfway into the event, while later, the car crawled to a halt with 5 minutes remaining in the race, ultimately crossing the line in 14th outright.
The penalty flushed the team down to the order, provisionally classifying it 44th out of 47 finishers.
The Mazda RX8 of David Murphy, Stiaan Kriel and Steven King, meanwhile, received a one-lap penalty when King was noted to have completed a stint timed at 3hr04min23.0231sec, with that exceedance falling into a lower penalty bracket.
Driving time at Bathurst has been in the spotlight over the years, most famously impacting the 1997 AMP Bathurst 1000, where the provisional race-winning BMW of Paul Morris and Craig Baird were scrubbed from the results after Baird exceeded three hours of continuous driving.
All told, penalties were added to the race finishing times of 24 of the 69 entries, with the non-driving time-related issues receiving penalties ranging from 5 seconds to 60 seconds.
Perhaps most telling was a 15-second penalty issued to the defending race-winning car of Dean Campbell and Cameron Hill.
While Hill provisionally crossed the finishing line first after passing Thomas Randle late, the penalty relegated the BMW to fifth on the result sheet.