The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix again left the seams of the International Automobile Federation (FIA) on the air, which is going through a profound stage of changes, hopefully for the better. It is clear that the body theoretically in charge of bringing sanity to the championship is the most foolish if we take into account what happened in Jeddah, where Fernando Alonso climbed on the drawer to celebrate the podium number 100 of his record before the FIA stripped him of him after applying a double sanction that three hours later ended up withdrawing him, placing him back in third place. In short, a scarecrow.
The first penalty led to the second. In the approach maneuver to the position he occupied on the grid (the second), Alonso placed his car too much to the left, so that the tires on that side stepped on the white painted margins that delimit the box within which they must be located. the single-seaters at the time of departure. As a consequence of this, he received a punishment of five extra seconds, to be carried out on the first visit to the workshops. The appearance of security (lap 18) motivated Aston Martin, like most, to detect the opportunity to scratch a few seconds off the stopwatch and called the Spaniard, who parked in front of the garage, trusting that his boys would know how to act based on what the car indicates. regulation to respect the penalty. Not all.
The regulations are very clear in these cases, and specify that no one can work on the prototype until those five seconds have elapsed. Despite this, the technician in charge of the rear jack fitted the tool into the rear of the green car without actually operating it. That motivated the second offense, this one lasting ten seconds, which was added to Alonso’s total time and which put him back in fourth place in the statistics. It so happens that this episode is a carbon copy of the one that Esteban Ocon and Alpine starred in, in Bahrain, two weeks ago.
Aston Martin’s disagreement led to a claim that led the executives of the Silverstone structure to the offices of the commissioners, where shortly before one in the morning the resolution of a case that places the body that rules the contest. Apparently, the argument used revolves around the discrepancy that exists between the action of touching the car with the jack, and that this is considered working on it. In any case, the final result allows the man from Oviedo to chain his second consecutive podium finish, something he had not achieved since 2013, when he was racing in Ferrari’s overalls.
“Let them take away my dance! I have enjoyed the podium and the FIA has not been very good, because it has had one hour, 35 laps, to announce the penalty. Apparently they didn’t have time”, Alonso said ironically, as soon as he got off his AMR23, and before he knew that podium number 100 was finally going to go up on his service sheet. At that time, the two-time world champion focused his criticism on the FIA, more specifically on his lateness. “If they had told me I had another ten seconds, I would have pushed harder to get eleven or twelve from George, because I could shoot a little more,” lamented the Spaniard, who maintains third place in the overall table, only behind the untouchables. Red Bull.
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