Penalties and track limits have played a major part in determining the outcome of the latest FIA Formula 2 Championship Feature Race at The Red Bull Ring in Austria over the weekend. While the eventual winner, Richard Verschoor was later disqualified, Kiwi Liam Lawson had a time penalty added to his finishing time due to exceeding track-limits and finished in tenth overall. Marcus Armstrong, winner of Saturday’s Sprint race retired on the opening lap after tangling with Jehan Daruvala on the second lap, but hangs on to sixth place in the championship Lawson sits tenth on 60-points.
“A difficult weekend,” admitted Lawson. “The speed again was very strong. The issue in Qualifying (14th) was that I got done for track limits basically, it’s a shame because we were quite fast and we should have been far higher up the grid.”
“Yesterday we had a drive shaft failure in the Sprint Race and today…. Today was my mistake. I obviously went wider than I should have a couple of times, and this one’s on me.”
“It does seem that the way the sensor works, if you slide out a bit, your rear is over but the front is still in, you trigger the sensor. It’s the same for everybody so I screwed up. The speed was good and that is why the penalty hurts even more.”
Jehan Daruvala has also received a post-race drive through penalty, which since it could not be served during the race, has been converted to a 20-second penalty in the final classification. The stewards found that the PREMA Racing team had attempted to dry the track surface at his grid slot ahead of the race commencing. It drops the PREMA driver down to 12th position.
Richard Verschoor, who dominated the Feature Race to take his third win in the Championship and his second of the 2022 season, was later disqualified after the Trident 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.
The two penalties promote Logan Sargeant to the race victory from his P3 finish at the chequered flag. Enzo Fittipaldi is promoted to second and Roberto Merhi now classifies third.
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