The FIA stewards have given Franco Colapinto a one-place grid penalty for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix
The Alpine driver left his garage during the first red flag period in Q1, before race control issued an official restart time. The session had been suspended after Yuki Tsunoda crashed.
The team realised its error immediately after Colapinto joined the pit’s fast lane, and informed him of the mistake.
“The team representative stated that he gave the instruction for the car to creep out but not be fully released,” the stewards noted. “The driver misunderstood the instruction and entered the fast lane before the re-start time was officially confirmed in breach of the race director’s event notes. Once this was done, it was too late to reverse course and the team instructed the driver to proceed down the pit lane.
“The team argued that there was no sporting advantage gained in this case as there was sufficient time remaining for other teams to perform their run plans as this was the start of the session. The team representative and the driver apologised for the inadvertent breach.”
Mercedes committed the same error with both their drivers’ cars at the Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this year. The stewards gave Alpine the same penalty after ruling Colapinto did not gain a sporting advantage.
“The stewards consider that this breach was inadvertent but it did require a sporting penalty to be imposed,” they ruled. “However as the breach was unintentional and this did not result in any sporting advantage, we decided to impose a one position grid penalty.”
“A similar breach in different circumstances, could entail a more severe sporting penalty, in future,” they added.
Colapinto’s penalty drops him from 15th place on the grid to 16th, promoting Liam Lawson.
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