Kevin Magnussen has avoided further penalties after he was investigated and cleared of “unsportsmanlike” driving.
However the Miami Grand Prix stewards want the FIA to allow them to apply tougher penalties to deter drivers committing repeat infringements as Magnussen did in Saturday’s sprint race.The Haas driver was given four penalties during the race, three of which were for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. Following comments he made in a post-race interview, the stewards looked into whether he had behaved in an “unsportsmanlike” way by incurring the penalties while delaying Lewis Hamilton in an effort to protect his team mate ahead of him.
The stewards said they “wanted to investigate if the driver of car 20 [Magnussen] was deliberately flouting the regulations to gain an advantage for his team or his team mate and if so, whether such conduct would be an infringement.”
Following a “lengthy hearing” with Magnussen and his team, the stewards decided “we do not think that the actions reached the level of unsportsmanlike behaviour.”
They noted that “a finding of unsportsmanlike behaviour is serious” and therefore “there must be clear evidence of an intention to behave in a manner that can be said to be unsportsmanlike.”
However the stewards are concerned that the present rules do not offer a strong enough deterrent to drivers who might try to deliberately slow a rival to an excessive degree while incurring multiple penalties. They intend to discuss the matter with the FIA.
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“The stewards will need to consider if, in appropriate situations, especially in the case of repeat infringements, the penalties to be applied for each infringement need to be increased to discourage scenarios such as those that we found today. This is something that we will raise explicitly with the FIA and the stewarding team.”
Magnussen told the stewards that “he thought that he was entitled to race with car 44 [Hamilton] in the manner that he did and also that he was willing to accept what he considered to be standard penalties that would have been imposed on him for any infringements that occurred while he was battling for position,” they noted.
“He was also of the view that building a gap between himself and the cars ahead was perfectly within the regulations and it was not uncommon for a driver to seek to assist his team mate in the course of a race by doing so.
“He did not at any point in time think that what he was doing was wrong or that it was in any way unsportsmanlike.”
The stewards took no further action against Magnussen, having already given him four time penalties totalling 35 seconds and four penalty points on his licence.
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roadrunner (@roadrunner)
5th May 2024, 2:10
One drive thru would solve the problem. I can’t and will never understand how they allow cars to continue in places they gained by unfair driving.
Jere (@jerejj)
5th May 2024, 6:41
Or ordering an immediate position swap.
MichaelN
5th May 2024, 9:55
Exactly, the race director has the authority to force a driver to give back any advantage gained by leaving the track. The stewards don’t even have to get involved.
Tommy C (@tommy-c)
5th May 2024, 4:02
Applying endless time penalties does nothing, especially in a sprint. Beyond the first 20 second penalty, I’d have liked to have seen a grid drop for the race or heck, just disqualify him from the event. F1 can do without his childish driving. The argument could be made that he rejoined the track in an unsafe manner when he failed to yield when Lewis first attempted an overtake. Kevin made no attempt to avoid contact when rejoining.
SteveP
5th May 2024, 9:21
If you saw the comment he made, post race, to the F1 commentary team, what he was doing was essentially team orders.
If that is true then the team principal needs to identify who gave that instruction, and they need some gardening leave to “take time to assess their behaviour”
Riccard
5th May 2024, 9:41
Or nullify all the team’s constructor points from the race
Kringle
5th May 2024, 11:30
The onus is on the driver behind not to crash into the car in front. Personally I have no point of contention with driving slower than you are capable of. If you think the Massa legal case was news, penalising that would open the biggest historical can of worms ever.
As an aside, when did we stop using drive through penalties? That would solve the stewards inferiority complex.
drmouse (@drmouse)
5th May 2024, 18:55
But this wasn’t just him driving slowly and defending. He deliberately broke the rules to defend, knowing that he’d be penalised but also knowing the team would get a big advantage from it. That’s easy beyond unsportsmanlike behaviour…
Tyler S
5th May 2024, 4:23
Something definitely needs a dressed with this style of defending. If all the stewards will do in these instances is keep piling on 10 second penalties, which Mag never had to serve during the Sprint, then that’s no longer a deterrence to this strategy. Once Mag accepted that his was relagated to last place, he could theoretically just keep cutting the chicane lap after lap, perpetually keeping everyone behind him. If any further penalties aren’t incurred immediately, or maybe ‘must be served within X laps’, then there’s no deterrence.
The stewards need to be able to force drivers who gain/keep positions by doing this to give up the position somehow. Force them to yield the position/do a drive-thru on the next lap or they’re black flagged and disqualified from the race.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
5th May 2024, 4:32
the stewards are a joke, thats why it doesn’t matter what they say. They have no consistency, their punishments for running people off the track are almost nothing, and who they choose to punish hard appears to be targeted.
Who cares what they think, nobody should, what Magnussen did was perfect for his team, he should do it again and again, theres no point in not running people off the track, because they never punish anyone for it, except on occasion.
Stewards = Bunk tyres = FIA = joke.
Red Andy (@red-andy)
5th May 2024, 6:11
They already have harsher penalties at their disposal, including drive-through penalties, stop/go penalties and the black flag. They just need to get out of the mindset that every incident, regardless of context, is worth only a time penalty, and start using their discretion to apply penalties appropriately.
BasCB (@bascb)
5th May 2024, 20:23
Yeah, surely as soon as the second time the stewards should have looked at just getting the car out of the position it was in here. Especially as previous behaviour of this same driver, this same team now seems to point towards a team strategy they are deploying to gain points towards their championship position.
Also, just pile on a bunch of points on his license so that he will have to sit out the next race if they even try to do this trick again.
RBAlonso (@rbalonso)
5th May 2024, 6:57
I’ve expressed my displeasure about the quality of stewarding a lot recently but the rules also need to change. I was always totally opposed to the 5 second penalty which I felt served as no deterrent, but 10s for a slight chicane cut in a sprint feels excessive to me. I think for that style of offence there should be the option of letting the driver behind through within a lap or, if the driver has pitted or lost another place or crashed, then 10s. The stewards should be aiming to keep the flow of the race, like ‘play on’ in football.
When Magnussen received 2 penalties in Saudi I thought it was obvious that the rules should change to make it a drive through within 3 laps or 1 in a sprint. We can’t have drivers breaking every rule they can think of when they know they can’t be punished further. That’s impotent stewardship.
Furthermore, I think the stewards need to bring back some discretion. What did Hamilton gain from speeding in the pits really? I understand it’s a broken rule, but it feels everything is a penalty regardless of common sense. When that happens, every time the stewards do apply common sense, like in the turn 1 clash, they are accused of inconsistency.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
5th May 2024, 8:39
Yes, agree with you and red andy that discretion is needed, too many incidents give the same punishment even though the gains are massively different.
SteveP
5th May 2024, 9:34
But what do you do if the driver doesn’t care about the penalty you impose after he ignores the drive-through penalty and continues to impede the progress of other drivers with similar incidents? Even a black flag doesn’t work if the driver ignores it – a historic incident with Schumacher comes to mind.
You’re almost in the position of informing the team that both cars would be excluded from the results and imposing financial penalties that come from their budget cap – likely to bite for even the best funded teams.
RBAlonso (@rbalonso)
5th May 2024, 12:54
I think those are 2 different scenarios. Magnussen was breaking rules not ignoring them. The framework is misaligned but I wouldn’t suggest Magnussen nor Haas would deny an instruction to pit. The only scenarios I can think of are Mansell ignoring the flag in Portugal and Schumacher at Silverstone. Both over 25 years ago. If a driver ignored a black flag I’d give them a 3 race ban and a huge fine for the constructor – but I can’t see it ever happening in modern F1.
Neil (@neilosjames)
5th May 2024, 12:24
It was… I hate to say… entertaining, but mostly that was because it happened during an irrelevant sideshow. In my head it didn’t really matter because it was only a sprint race, so I could quite easily put aside my dislike of that sort of driving and just watch two cars being quite close together.
But I do think the rules and punishments around this sort of thing need addressing. If a driver is deliberately breaking the rules to keep rivals behind for [insert reason, but for example to benefit their team] there need to be a power for the race director/stewards to immediately get them out of the way, and it should be treated far more harshly than ‘accidental’ rule breaking.
MGus.ai
5th May 2024, 15:15
For people who dont like DRS, this MAG defence is the typical action one could expect from nonDRS cars.
Or worse, if it would take too much trouble overtaking, then lets settle for a 3sec gap from the car infront as tha car behind will do the same.
Jim from US (@jimfromus)
5th May 2024, 14:27
The stewards failed to remedy the situation. MAG should have been black flagged after the 4th incident. Let’s say we’re in Monaco and a team has drivers in similar positions and the behind driver keeps cutting that one spot in the track where there is a quick left and right turn but you can go straight? That is not defending a position but cheating.