Nico Hulkenberg has held onto his 10th place starting grid position for Formula 1\u2019s Singapore Grand Prix despite having been found to have \u201cunnecessarily impeded\u201d Carlos Sainz in qualifying.<\/p>\n
Even Hulkenberg seemed to be expecting a penalty for impeding Sainz as he was on the racing line on the entry to Turn 5 on a cooldown lap, while Sainz was pushing on his final Q2 lap.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know, I didn’t get told, I thought he was on a cool lap or whatever, I don’t know. I didn’t have a call – and yeah, doesn’t sound great, unfortunately!\u201d Hulkenberg said after qualifying when asked about the investigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sainz had to abandon his lap and was knocked out in 14th place, with Hulkenberg\u2019s Audi also eliminated in 11th – but George Russell\u2019s grid penalty means he\u2019ll start 10th.<\/p>\n
But Hulkenberg’s impeding went unpunished because what the stewards described as \u201cextraordinary mitigating circumstances\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Audi told the stewards that they believed \u201cbased on timing information to which they subscribed, sourced from the official timekeeping provider, that [Sainz] had already taken the chequered flag and conveyed that information to the driver by radio.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTherefore [Hulkenberg] did not expect [Sainz] to still be on a push lap when it was closing in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe stewards acknowledge the fact that the data referenced by the team led the team to reasonably believe that [Sainz] had received the chequered flag. Indeed, it was evident from [Sainz\u2019s] radio messages that its team had formed the same belief relying on the same data.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe misunderstanding was revealed to be attributable to the information initially received by the teams not being fully synchronised and only being displayed in a correct manner after a short period of time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, that post-processing did not occur until [Sainz] arrived behind [Hulkenberg], depriving the team of any reasonable opportunity to correct the information conveyed to the driver.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the stewards\u2019 assessment, because the source of the data upon which the team relied was the official timing provider, it was not unreasonable for the team to have relied upon it, even though the team also had available to it the official timing data which conflicted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe stewards determined that Car 55 was unnecessarily impeded. However, there were extraordinary mitigating circumstances in this case because the incident was attributable to the team\u2019s reliance on information that was, for a brief period, inconsistent.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Williams team boss James Vowles had said before the judgement was revealed that: \u201cOne of the systems indicated that he had crossed the line after the flag, but in reality he hadn\u2019t and we need to make sure we tighten up that process and keep pushing until such time as we are confident.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nico Hulkenberg has held onto his 10th place starting grid position for Formula 1\u2019s Singapore Grand Prix despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":928137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-928136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}