FIA gave double punishment to F1 team who fielded 'third car' at Japanese GP

25 September 2023 , 09:20

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Logan Sargeant's problems began with his crash in qualifying on Saturday (Image: AP)

Logan Sargeant was sanctioned by the Formula 1 stewards with a double punishment before the Japanese Grand Prix had even begun.

The American had already had a fairly wretched weekend to that point. He crashed right at the beginning of qualifying, condemning him to the back of the grid and leaving his Williams mechanics with a huge repair job to get the car ready for the race.

But it was that crash and those repair efforts that led to the sanction handed down an hour before the start of Sunday's race. It was because the FIA was unhappy with how much work the team had done on Sargeant's spare chassis.

The rules do not allow teams to build up a spare chassis to "more than an assembly comprising a survival cell" – the part of the car which protects the driver in the event of a hefty crash. That is to stop teams from having a 'third car' on standby in case needed during a race weekend.

The FIA's technical delegate Jo Bauer, when carrying out his inspections, felt Williams had done too much work on that spare chassis before parc ferme had ended. So, according to the rules, they technically had three cars available at once.

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The stewards concurred with Bauer's view of the situation after he had referred the matter to them. So the rules had been breached and they needed to hand down a penalty to Williams and, unfortunately, Sargeant.

A pit-lane start is the minimum punishment for such a breach. But it was not going to be satisfactory in this case as the American was already going to be starting the race there, because the team had also made set-up changes under parc ferme conditions.

So, in the eyes of the stewards, an additional sanction was required. That is what Sargeant was slapped with a 10-second time penalty before the race had even begun, further hampering his already very slim hopes of taking away something tangible at the end.

It wasn't long before he picked up an in-race penalty to compound his frustration, an extra five seconds for locking up and smacking into the side of Valtteri Bottas' Alfa Romeo. And the damage he picked up in the process led to his team calling him in to the garage to retire the car.

Sargeant said afterwards: "The second I touched the brake in Turn 11, I was locked. I thought [Bottas] would have seen it and gone inside, because I was never going to make the corner. But once he went to the outside, there was nothing I could do to avoid it... It's my fault."

Daniel Moxon