How dropping the 'Verstappen rule' will help F1 drivers race
FIA F1 race director Charlie Whiting is confident that dropping the “Verstappen rule” for 2017 will lead to fewer penalties being issued, and more consistent decisions from the stewards.
Toward the end of last season, the FIA put a focus on drivers moving in the braking area after incidents involving Max Verstappen led to complaints from other drivers. Sebastian Vettel was subsequently penalized after he a move he made while battling with Daniel Ricciardo in Mexico.
As part of an initiative from the Strategy Group to have fewer penalties impacting the outcome, and to allow the drivers to race, the FIA is allowing more freedom – as long as the move is not dangerous.
“Some of the incidents that we saw last year will maybe be handled slightly differently,” said Whiting in Melbourne on Thursday. “Simply because the so-called Verstappen rule has gone. Before we said any move under braking will be investigated. Now we have a simple rule which says effectively that if a driver moves erratically or goes unnecessarily slowly or behaves in a manner that could endanger another driver, then he will be investigated. So there’s a very broad rule now.
“But what we did in Austin last year if you remember, in response to some comments from drivers, was that we used the existing rules to put into the event notes that we issued as how we were going to interpret the existing rules. And the interpretation simply was that drivers shouldn’t move under braking – that’s what gave rise to the penalty to Seb [Vettel] in Mexico.
“That will be dealt with slightly differently in that the stewards will be invited to simply focus on every incident and judge it on its own merits. Each incident will be dealt with only on the basis of whether or not it was a dangerous maneuver, not necessarily because he moved under braking.”
Whiting confirmed that such moves would still actually be reported and thus investigated, and thus it would be up to the stewards to go through the process and make a call each time.
“It would probably automatically trigger an investigation, or a request to the stewards to have a look at it, as with any incidents. But the way we interpreted the regulations last year was to simply use the rules that we had to say that moving under braking was potentially dangerous, and hence would be reported to the stewards every time.
“But what we were requested to do, which we think is a more general way of approaching things, is to give the stewards one rule to work with. And it’s an all-encompassing rule, you can do more or less anything with that.
“I think that was the request from the teams, they wanted less investigation, only in cases where it was clearly dangerous would they take action. We had a meeting yesterday with all the stewards, and we reviewed all the controversial incidents from last year to see how they would be dealt with under the so called new rules, or the new approach. I won’t go into it now, but it was quite interesting. I think things would have been dealt with differently, in some cases.”
In order to speed up the decision process, the FIA has instigated a new system which gives stewards a more efficient way of comparing incidents with previous examples, with a reference to what penalties resulted.
“What we’ve done to try and help the stewards is to introduce what we call a video archive system, which allows them to instantly refer to other incidents of a similar nature. So without having to trawl through and try and remember what happened to so and so, they’ll be able to pull up any similar incident.
“They’ll be sorted by type of incident for example – causing a collision, click, click, click, six of those incidents, see what the decisions were, because they’ll be tagged to those incidents, and then that should be able to give the stewards not only more chance to be consistent, but also faster.”
Whiting confirmed that making more than one move while defending would still trigger a penalty: “That’s a different rule, that’s defending, and what we’re talking about is just moving in the braking zone. Defending is different, if you move more than once to defend a position, there’s a separate rule, and they [the drivers] are all against that. It’s still illegal.”
Drivers have welcomed the changes.
“The good part of it is that it means there are less decisions to be made in a way,” said Daniel Ricciardo. “If they leave it up to us I guess the positive is we sort it out on track. Hopefully we can get redemption if we feel that something has not gone our way. But I like being able to race, that’s a positive from it.”
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