At times it can be difficult to get one’s head around the driving standards in the FIA Formula 2 Championship and the fact that those competing are the next breed of drivers hoping to get through to the top-tier Formula One. No more so than when time-penalties were handed out to drivers for track infrIngements (not staying on the race track) over the weekend at The Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria. From an observers point of view, do they not get it?
Go back a month to the F2 Feature Race at the Azerbaijan F1 Grand Prix and we had Van Amersfoort Racing’s Amaury Cordeel receiving a three-place grid penalty and the addition of an extra penalty point on his licence after he swerved across into the path of Campos’ Olli Caldwell at Turn 4. This meant he had a total of 12- points and thus an automatic ban from the next F2 round.
But wait, there is more….
Also called to the stewards office at Baku was Cem Bolukbasi, after an altercation broke out between the Turkish driver’s father and Roy Nissany, which resulted in a €5000 fine for Bolukbasi and the removal of his father’s credentials for the following round at Silverstone.
Is this an international motorsport championship or a circus?
In the Feature Race on Sunday at The Red Bull Ring, 18 drivers infringed the track limits, most more than once. The worst perpetrator was Kiwi Liam Lawson.
Earlier, after having his fastest qualifying time deleted because of not staying on the track, you would have thought both Lawson and his Carlin Team would have learnt and stayed on the straight and narrow heading into the rest of the race weekend.
There were 22 drivers that took part in the FIA F2 Feature Race. Two of those retired early, Marcus Armstrong (HitechGP) on the opening lap and Cem Bolukbasi (Charouz Racing System) after completing three-laps.
Two drivers that didn’t infringe were Felipe Drugovich (MP Motorsport) and Richard Vershoor (Trident). The other 18 were all caught at least once, infringing the track limits at either Turn One or Nine.
Juri Vips (HitechGP), Ayumu Iwasa (DAMS) and Calan Williams (Trident) offended three different times while for Frederik Vesti (ART Grand Prix) it was four!
However, Liam Lawson (Carlin) was found to have breached track limits on five separate occasions, four at Turn 9 and once at Turn 1, incurring an additional time penalty which dropped him out of a points scoring position.
Of the two drivers that did not infringe, one crossed the line in first place while the other continues to lead the 2022 FIA Formula 2 Championship.
Trident’s Richard Verschoor dominated the Feature Race to take his third win in the Championship but was later disqualified after his team were unable to provide the required post-race fuel sample for scrutineering.
The Dutch driver had stopped on track midway through his cooldown lap, and during post-race Scrutineering Car #20 could not provide the 0.8kg of fuel required, with only 31.3 grams extracted from the fuel tank.
Felipe Drugovich finished outside the points in 11th, just the second race of the season where he hasn’t collected points. He didn’t infringe in the Feature Race and has a 39-point advantage over eventual winner Logan Sargeant.
We have no idea of how difficult it is for the drivers to maximise every lap while staying on the track. Yet Drugovich didn’t and he is leading the series. As a colleague said, replace the white line at the edge of the track with a wall snd few will try to infringe, so what’s the difference?
There have been enough mistakes by not only Lawson but many others in the F2 pitlane. Making the same mistake at this level of motorsport five times, there is no excuse. That is the difference, as Verschoor and Drugovich have proved, between winning and making up the grid numbers.
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