F1 stewards in scathing criticism of Ferrari as Leclerc gets Austrian GP penalty

01 July 2023 , 14:26

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Charles Leclerc was penalised by the stewards (Image: Getty Images)

Charles Leclerc was slapped with a three-place Sprint grid penalty after he impeded Oscar Piastri during qualifying for the short-form race.

It happened on Saturday morning, during the first part of the session. Piastri was on a flying lap heading into the second-to-last corner when he had to take evasive action to avoid the slow-moving Ferrari.

It proved to be costly for the Aussie who was one of the first five drivers knocked out of that session. And Leclerc benefitted from it himself as he was 15th and next in line to be knocked out if Piastri improved his time.

So the incident was referred to the stewards after the session. And both drivers were called to give their sides of the story.

Piastri argued he had to slow down by around 45kph to avoid hitting into the back of the slow-moving Ferrari. And telemetry data studied by the stewards backed up that assertion.

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They judged that the McLaren driver had lost around half-a-second as a result of the incident. Therefore, it is likely that Piastri would have moved out of the danger zone if he had completed the lap without interruption.

In his defence, Leclerc said he was told he was six second ahead of Piastri at the last point of communication, which was at Turn 4 of that lap. Ferrari admitted to the stewards that they "could have done better" to keep the driver more informed of where on the track the Australian was.

Oscar Piastri was blocked off by Charles Leclerc (Sky Sports)

The stewards' judgement was that Leclerc had unnecessarily impeded Piastri and dropped him from sixth to ninth on the grid for the Sprint race. And in the official document announcing that penalty, they were notably critical of Ferrari.

They wrote: "We determine that although this was not entirely the fault of the driver and that the team's lack of communication was the major contributing factor. A grid position penalty must be imposed as car #81 was “unnecessarily impeded”, because there is no doubt that the situation could have been avoided."

It is not the first time this year Leclerc has been given a penalty for impeding when not told about an approaching car by his team. In Monaco, he got in the way of Lando Norris during qualifying while his race engineer was too busy telling the Monegasque about a lap time Max Verstappen had just set.

Daniel Moxon