Article from the-race.com on the penalty Norris received for backing up the pack to create space for a double-stack. The article starts:
Lando Norris and his McLaren Formula 1 team were surprised by his penalty for “unsportsmanlike” conduct in the Canadian Grand Prix and felt it was a departure from how such incidents are usually judged…
I have not much of an opinion about whether this behavior should get a penalty or not… but good stewarding is consistent stewarding, and this is not that. If they are aiming to establish a new stricter and consistent standard here then it seems that should have been articulated in the race-director’s notes and driver’s briefing at the start of the weekend. If this batch of stewards just don’t know the relevant precedents and backing up the pack will be fine again next race… well… doing better than that would be nice.
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I wonder if the stewards basically combined his two borderline incidents and gave him one penalty for it. I thought he was likely to get a penalty for the unsafe release and was pretty surprised he didn’t, but on the flip side it seemed unlikely to get a penalty for driving too slow under a safety car.
As for the stewards problem, I really think they need to do a hybrid approach. Have 2-3 members of the stewards team that are on the FIA payroll and are part of the stewarding team at every event, but bring in an additional 2-3 different local stewards as well. Hopefully it would bring some consistency across how specific incidents are ruled, but by cycling new people through the group you avoid favoritism arguments.
I think it is fair. He is disadvantaging Charles and Alex. The condition is because it was under the safety car Charles and Alex can’t overtake him because he is driving slow. Their logic of it is okay to slow down only applies in full race conditions where he can defend and try to stop them overtaking him.
I do think it’s a bit odd they used the Unsportsmanlike Conduct rule for it, but it’s also a perfectly valid way to enforce a longstanding precedent. Exploiting the Safety Car rules to impede other drivers has been pretty consistently off limits, so it feels like a bit of a storm in a teacup to kick up a fuss over the wording used for the breach. It’s not like the penalty was unusual, a 5s Time Penalty is basically the weakest possible sporting penalty outside things which are effectively warnings.
