Tag: fia

Vettel’s Apology to Racing Fans After Azerbaijan Incident

In accordance with the FIA’s instructions Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel has issued an apology to the racing community.

Dear motor-racing fans
Concerning the incidents of Baku I’d like to explain myself: During the re-start lap, I got surprised by Lewis and ran into the back of his car. With hindsight, I don’t believe he had any bad intentions. In the heat of the action I then overreacted, and therefore I want to apologise to Lewis directly, as well as to all the people who were watching the race. I realize that I was not setting a good example.

I had no intention at anytime to put Lewis in danger, but I understand that I caused a dangerous situation.

Therefore, I would like to apologise to the FIA. I accept and respect the decisions that were taken at today’s meeting in Paris, as well as the penalty imposed by the Stewards in Baku.

I love this sport and I am determined to represent it in a way that can be an example for future generations.

July 3, 2017
FIA Decides Not to Further Sanction Sebastian Vettel for Azerbaijan Incident

After his incident at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix which he was given a 10-second stop-and-go penalty, the FIA has decided not to further punish Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel for his transgression.

Vettel was issued with a 10-second stop and go penalty for steering into Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton after driving into the back of the Mercedes believing that Hamilton had brake tested him. At the time, the penalty handed down was the harshest a driver could receive short of a black flag.

While the FIA was happy with the penalty handed down by the stewards they were concerned about the implications of the decision where it seemed that Vettel was let off rather too easy. The FIA was concerned about the example Vettel’s behavior sets for the younger generation of racers and about the reputation of the organization itself.

Vettel together with Ferrari Team Principal Maurizio Arrivabene reviewed the incident with the FIA Deputy President for Sport Graham Stoker, FIA General Secretary for Sport Peter Bayer, FIA Formula One World Championship Race Director Charlie Whiting, and FIA Formula One World Championship Deputy Race Director and FIA Safety Director Laurent Mekies after which Vettel accepted full responsibility for the incident and extended an apology to the FIA and the wider motorsport family.

In addition to his apology Vettel dedicated his personal time of the next 12-months to educational activities across FIA events including the FIA Formula 1 Championship, FIA Formula Three Championship and FIA Formula Four Championship. FIA President Jean Todt has also instructed that Vettel will not be able to represent the FIA on any road safety activities until the end of the year.

Matter Declared Closed

Todt declared the matter closed after Vettel’s apology but warned that a repeat of such behavior from the German would see him referred to the FIA International Tribunal for further investigation.

“Top level sport is an intense environment in which tempers can flare,” said Todt on today’s outcome.

“However, it is the role of top sportsmen to deal with that pressure calmly and to conduct themselves in a manner that not only respects the regulations of the sport but which befits the elevated status they enjoy.

“Sportsmen must be cognisant of the impact their behaviour can have on those who look up to them. They are heroes and role models and to millions of fans worldwide and must conduct themselves accordingly.”

Ferrari issued their statement shortly after the FIA’s. Statement in full below:

“Following the meeting that was held today in Paris between FIA representatives and Scuderia Ferrari driver S.Vettel, with the purpose of clarifying positions on the incidents occurred at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Scuderia Ferrari notes the driver’s apologies and his personal commitments to help the image of the sport. Scuderia Ferrari confirms its support to FIA’s initiatives, sharing the governing’s body values and objectives.”

July 3, 2017
Vettel Not off the Hook Yet

Formula One governing body, the FIA has decided to further investigate the clash between F1 title rivals Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel.

The clash between the drivers happened behind the safety car at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix when Vettel ran into the back of Lewis Hamilton who was in the lead and was backing up the pack before the restart. Vettel made contact with Hamilton coming out of Turn 16 after it looked like Hamilton slowed down, seemingly catching Vettel off-guard. Vettel, after running into the back of Hamilton, pulled alongside the Mercedes and deliberately banged wheels with Hamilton.

The German received a 10-second stop-and-go penalty for his indiscretion.

The FIA has now decided to further investigate the incident. The FIA said in a statement:

“Following the recent incident at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in which Car 5 (Sebastian Vettel) was involved in a collision with Car 44 (Lewis Hamilton), on Monday 3rd July, the FIA will further examine the causes on the incident in order to evaluate whether further action is necessary.

“A statement regarding the outcome of this process will be made available before the upcoming Austrian Grand Prix.”

After the race Hamilton openly shared his feelings towards Vettel and called him a “disgrace” and said that it set a bad example for the younger generation in the sport.

Vettel remained defiant throughout and never acknowledged pulling alongside Hamilton and deliberately steering into him.

Depending on what the FIA decide Vettel could be looking at a race ban among other penalties.

June 28, 2017
FIA Releases 2018 F1 Calendar

The FIA, at the World Motorsport Council meeting at it’s Geneva Headquarters, announced a 21-race calendar for the 2018 Formula One season.

The season will run from 25 March 2018 at the Australian Grand Prix till 25 November 2018 at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The Azerbaijan Grand Prix gets pushed up to 29 April while the Russian Grand Prix will take place later in the year.

The French Grand Prix makes a come back in 2018 after a decade of not featuring on the F1 calendar. The French Grand Prix will take place in Le Castellet at the Paul Ricard circuit. The French GP is scheduled for 24 June 2018 after the Canadian Grand Prix.

The Hockenheimring makes a come back for 2018 and will take place on 22 July 2018, after the British Grand Prix.

The Singapore and Chinese Grands Prix are still to be confirmed.

It’s a rather tight calendar with the European season seeing many back-to-back races.

June 19, 2017
Force India Handed Suspended €25 000 Fine For Breach of Livery Regulations
The Sahara Force India Formula One team has been handed a €25 000 suspended fine for not complying with the new interpretation of Article 9.2 of the FIA Sporting Regulations.

The stewards handed down the fine which was suspended for 12months after Force India agreed to work with the FIA stewards to bring the team in-line with the new interpretation.

The fine was suspended because Force India argued three mitigating circumstances which the FIA accepted. They were:
1. The Competitor was not challenged about the numbers prior to the race
2. The numbers (size, colour and location) were not changed during the event
3. The Competitor has offered to work with the FIA and rectify the situation immediately
After the Russian Grand Prix the teams were instructed to increase the size of the car numbers and driver name graphics to make it easier for fans to identify. Many teams at the Spanish Grand Prix had the three letter driver abbreviation and car number or some variation thereof featuring on the shark fin or on the engine cover, along the side of the air inlet and the forward facing section of the nose.

It was different for Force India as most of the real estate on their engine cover, shark fin and nose has been taken up by sponsor logos with their main sponsor enjoying complete coverage on the cars shark fin. The team did however, increase the size of the numbering on their cars in all areas but it was a bit more difficult to see if one was in line with the car. The car numbers on the nose were not on the forward facing section of the nose but rather on the upward facing section and the numbering on the side was placed on the upper section of the side pod.

Speaking to Motorsport.com Force India Sporting Director Andy Stevenson said that they felt they were in full compliance with the regulations. They had presented their interpretation to the FIA at the Russian Grand Prix and no issues were raised by the FIA. Subsequent to that, the car had passed scruitineering without any objections ahead of the race weekend.

The team will work with the FIA to rectify the problem before the Monaco Grand Prix in two weeks time.

Photo credit: Sahara Force India Formula One Team
May 14, 2017
New Restart Rules and Tighter Regulations on T-Wings in the Pipeline

The F1 Commission and the F1 Strategy Group met today (25 April 2017) in Paris to discuss technical and sporting changes to F1. The meeting, was for the first time, attended by the CEO of the Formula One Group, Chase Carey.

The sporting and technical changes have all been agreed to and will now go to the World Motorsport Council to be approved.

After running the proposed Halo head protection last season during some of the practice sessions it seems as thought the FIA has now abandoned the idea of the halo and will now focus their energies, together with the teams, in testing the a new “shield” type solution. The FIA hopes to test this new solution during the season for it to be rolled out in time for the 2018 Formula 1 season.

Future designs for the shark fins and T-wings will be limited going forward.

“Changes in the regulation boxes around the engine cover have been made so that designs incorporating the ‘t-wing’ and ‘shark fin’ will be strictly limited,” said the FIA in a statement.

The topic of burning oil has been a contentious issue recently with some teams convinced that Mercedes have been using this technique especially during qualifying to get more power out of their engines. Regulations will now be tightened up and teams will only be allowed one specification of oil for an entire Grand Prix weekend.

Another proposed change is the restart procedure after a red flag during the race. Currently drivers will line up on the grid or in the pit lane during a red flag period. Once the track has been cleared the field gets underway behind the safety car. The new procedure will be to line up on the grid for a standing start.

The final sporting change was that tyre supplier Pirelli will be able to test the 2018 wet weather tyre compounds using the previous specifications of cars and wheel dimensions.

From the Spanish Grand Prix the FIA will enforce the rules regarding the visibility of driver names and numbers.

Finally, F1 Strategy Group meetings will be opened to non-member teams to enable them access to the discussions. This, the FIA says, demonstrates the effective commitment of both the FIA and the Commercial Rights Holder to improve transparency in the sport.

April 25, 2017
F1 2017: ‘Verstappen Rule’ Dropped

The ‘Verstappen rule’ which regulates a driver’s movement under braking, which defending his position, has been dropped for the 2017 season.

FIA director Charlie Whiting has confirmed that the regulation, dubbed the ‘Verstappen rule’ is no longer in the regulations. Instead, race stewards will be given more freedom when assessing similar incidents in the future. Specifically, Whiting has said that no driver will be given a penalty unless he is “wholly or predominantly to blame for an incident”.

The reasoning behind the regulation change, Whiting explains, is to provide stewards with more flexibility when making decisions and to give the ability to apply common sense.

“I think there would be a small change in some of the incidents that we’ve seen last year — they’d be handled quite differently simply because the so-called “Verstappen rule” is gone to the effect that before we said any move under braking will be investigated,” he explained. “Now, we have a simple rule that says effectively that if a driver moves erratically or goes unnecessarily slow or behaves in a manner that could endanger another driver, then he will be investigated. So there’s a very broad rule now.

Whiting went on to say that stewards will focus on each incident and to judge it on its merits. Therefore, each incident will be considered on the basis of whether it was a dangerous manoeuvre, instead of simply determining if a driver has moved under braking.

What’s more, stewards will now also have instant access to archived footage of past incidents to ensure that decision are made quicker and more consistently. “What we’ve done to try and help the stewards is to introduce what we call a video archiving system which allows them to instantly refer to other incidents of a similar nature. Without having to trawl through and find what happened with so-and-so, they’ll be able to pull up any similar incidents. They’ll be sorted by type of incident for example, causing a collision, click click, six of those incidents, see what the decisions were because they will be tagged to the incident.”

The question now is what will the FIA and its stewards consider to be a dangerous manoeuvre?

March 23, 2017
Australian Gp Preview: F1 2017 Finally Comes To Life

The wait for the 2017 Formula 1 season is nearly over as it heads into the first round at Australia’s Albert Park circuit.

This weekend one of the most dramatic overhauls of F1 regulations will finally come to life as the battle commences for the 2017 championship. From a purely visual perspective the wider tyres and different aerodynamic layout of the cars present a rather different, but appealing, new look to Formula 1. They will be much faster too and may be up to five seconds a lap quicker than their predecessors.

With the new era comes a change in several sporting regulations too. For the tyres Pirelli have attempted to provide more durability so as to allow drivers to push harder for longer before it begins to degrade. Whether this will have a detrimental effect on strategy, cutting down on the number of stops, remains to be seen.

Should it rain Down Under the race will longer start behind a safety-car. Instead, the safety-car will take the field around the track until it is deemed safe to re-start in which case the cars will line up on the grid for a standing start. Further, the launch off the grid has been tightened up where it concerns the clutch. It’s now up to the driver to find the correct bite point, without any pre-programmed settings, and to ensure the best start without getting wheelspin or bogging down the engine.

The eight days of running, across two sessions of testing, suggested that the top three teams might be the closest they’ve been since the start of the hybrid era. Lewis Hamilton has been on record calling Ferrari the favourite. Race drivers Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen shied away from such declarations but there is no denying that the Scuderia have made an impressive step forward. So impressive in fact that it is likely the team to beat in Australia. But they aren’t buying into the hype though as Ferrari president, Sergio Marcionne, has insisted that Mercedes are still ahead.

For their part Mercedes have announced that it will be running a second, upgraded, specification of engine in Australia. While reports are that it would’ve been introduced later on because of reliability concerns to the timetable has been moved up. There could be several reasons for this but the likelihood is that Mercedes is feeling slightly nervous about the Ferrari hence the early introduction.

What is a fact is that both Ferrari and Mercedes were sandbagging at different times during testing in Spain and the true pace of both cars will only be revealed in Saturday’s qualifying session.

Along with Ferrari and Mercedes, Red Bull are tipped to be part of the front-running group the true pace of the RB13 is the biggest mystery of the top three teams. While Renault has made impressive progressive with its 2017 power unit it is still behind the Mercedes and Ferrari. Despite this, given the street-like layout of Albert Park, Red Bull is very much the dark horse. While they are well capable of springing a surprise with all things being equal it’s unlikely to be for the top step of the podium.

As part street-track with a layout comprised, mostly, of medium speed corners, the Albert Park circuit is an outlier on the calendar that is unlikely to present the truest representation of the pecking order in 2017. Nevertheless, at the end of it there will be twenty-five important points and it is the first step of a 2017 season in which it seems that there might finally be a three-horse race.

March 22, 2017
FIA Clarifies Sale of 1% Share in F1 Holding Company
The FIA have moved to clarify comments about their sale of the 1% holding in Delta Topco(The holding company of the commercial rights of Formula 1).

A report on Forbes accused the FIA of a conflict of interest when selling the 1% share of Delta Topco, which at the time of sale to Liberty Media was worth $80 Million.

The issue was that the FIA, as the regulatory body of F1, needed to give approval of the sale of F1 to Liberty Media. The FIA, which owned 1% of Delta Topco, could only cash in on the 1% if F1’s commercial rights, which were owned by Delta Topco, was sold.

The FIA gave approval and was handed a cheque by Liberty Media.

In a statement released by the FIA on Thursday 16 February 2017, they clarify all the allegations made in various reports. They’ve also said that they are willing to prove that there was no conflict of interest during the sale of F1.

Full statement below:

“In light of this, the FIA wishes to make clear the following once again:
- Firstly, the prize money allocated in the Formula One World Championship is done so in accordance with the bilateral agreements that exist between each team and the Commercial Rights Holder (CRH). The FIA has no knowledge of these agreements
- Secondly, there is no conflict of interest on the part of the FIA with regard to its approval of the change of control of the CRH which has been approved by the World Motor Sport Council taking into consideration exclusively the terms of the existing agreements between the CRH and the FIA and the best interests of the Championship
- As per the Agreements made in 2001 for 100 Years, the FIA could only have withheld its consent in the event that the change of control would materially alter the ability of the CRH to fulfill its obligations; it is obvious that the taking of control of the Formula One Group by Liberty does not create such a risk, and nobody has ever suggested a different view in this respect
The FIA would naturally be happy to demonstrate the absence of any conflict of interest to any competent authority that may so request.

Once again, the FIA looks forward to its collaboration with both Liberty and the Formula One Group to create a constructive relationship that will ensure the continued success and the development of the FIA Formula One World Championship in the long term.”
February 16, 2017
FIA Gives the Green Light for Liberty Media Take Over of F1

The sale of F1 commercial rights to the Liberty Media Group was given the green light today at an extraordinary meeting of the World Motorsport Council (WMSC) in Geneva on Wednesday 18 January, a day after shareholders gave approval for the media giant to forge ahead with its plans to acquire a controlling interest in F1.

Representatives from Liberty Media presented their strategy for F1 to members of the WMSC who were given an opportunity to ask questions about the acquisition and the future relationship between the FIA and Liberty Media’s plans for the sport.

“Liberty, Formula One Group and the FIA intend to collaborate to create a constructive relationship that will ensure the continued success and the development of the FIA Formula One World Championship in the long term,” said the FIA in a statement released after the meeting.

“The World Motor Sport Council’s decision confirms the FIA’s belief that Liberty, as a renowned media organisation with expertise in both sport and entertainment, is clearly well positioned to ensure the continued development of its pinnacle Championship.

“The FIA holds a one per cent shareholding in Delta Topco. As part of the sale by CVC to Liberty Media Corporation, and in line with the agreements between the FIA and the Formula One Group, the FIA will be dragged along in the sale process under the same conditions as CVC and all the other shareholders.

“The FIA looks forward to working with the new owners of the Formula One Group on further developing the unrivalled global spectacle that is the FIA Formula One World Championship for all stakeholders.”

It seems like Liberty Media is well on it’s way to closing the deal before the end of March with just a few more formalities cross off.

January 18, 2017