Toyota is trying to appeal the decision of the stewards of the Australian GP, but the FIA is not keen to accept any appeal, based on the arguments that were used at Spa last year when Lewis Hamilton was given a similar penalty and an appeal was ruled inadmissible.
Toyota has been reading the rulebooks and has found a way to lodge an appeal with the Clerk of the Course, Australia’s former F1 driver Tim Schencken. He will refer the appeal to the International Court of Appeal. Whether the court decides that the appeal is inadmissible remains to be seen, but we would expect Toyota to withdraw the protest before that happens as the team is skating on fairly thin ice, after the incident on Saturday when the two cars were sent to the back of the grid when the rear wing was found to be too flexible.
Many in the F1 paddock felt that the punishment was not severe enough and that Toyota should have been excluded from the meeting for such an offence. The team said that the problem had been caused by manufacturing errors – not something that fits in with the company’s legendary attention to detail.
It is nice that they fixed the cars to make them race closer, now they need to fix the adjudication and the stewards. Despite all that was remarkable from this race, the stewards just keep on screwing it up. For example:
- The 10 place grid penalty for Vettel was ridiculous. It was a racing incident. If you want cars to race close, that is what happens. Why would a driver fight for position late in a race now that you run a chance of getting a penalty. That said, I thought the fine for Vettel keeping on driving was fair, but why didn’t they bother to black flag him?
- How can Toyota passes a FIA inspections yet it is the teams that bring up things like the flexing wings? Either the inspection is not detailed enough or someone didn’t do their job.
- Finally, with all the technology at the stewards, how could they have muff the Hamilton/Trulli thing so badly? They had three laps under the safety car to figure out the race order.
I don’t want to go ranting and raving, but I am tired of the attitude I get as a fan from the FIA and the adjudicators on the ground. They fall asleep at the wheel when they are running the race and then they try to fix things after the fact.
It might be a new year, but we still have the Keystone cops officiating.
Oh well, off to Malaysia!!!
BTW: Thanks for doing the Sidepodcast interviews. Brilliant stuff.
I agree with Dan. It really is time something was done to sort out how stewards and other FIA officials reach decisions. Last year in an IRL race Helio Castroneves repeatedly gave Justin Wilson the Schumacher chop to prevent him overtaking. Rather than dreaming up some random time penalty or the even worse grid penalty for the next race the race director radoied Castroneves’s team and told them to tell him to yield the position.
In a situation like Trulli’s the race director should be able to make an immediate decision and tell Toyota that Jarno has to cede his position. Give that all this happened during one of the interminable full course yellows there is no reason why it could not have been sorted out before the green flag was shown.
Vettel and Kubica was boys being boys. We want wheel to wheel racing and occasionally there will be a little contact. No harm done and both will have their failings explained to them in words of one syllable by their teams. No need for the stewards to penalise anyone.
Someone needs to show the stewards Dijon 79 and then tell them about Mario Andretti’s comment that it was just a couple of young lions scrapping.
[...] Toyota appealing? – Joe Saward’s Grand Prix Blog"Toyota has been reading the rulebooks and has found a way to lodge an appeal with the Clerk of the Course, Australia’s former F1 driver Tim Schencken. He will refer the appeal to the International Court of Appeal. Whether the court decides that the appeal is inadmissible remains to be seen, but we would expect Toyota to withdraw the protest before that happens as the team is skating on fairly thin ice, after the incident on Saturday when the two cars were sent to the back of the grid when the rear wing was found to be too flexible." [...]