Thirteen F3 drivers receive penalty
Thirteen drivers were given grid penalties for the second race of last weekend’s Misano Formula 3 European Championship round after a bizarre second qualifying session.
No fewer than 15 of the 22 drivers were found to have exceeded track limits after all teams were instructed to present their drivers’ onboard footage at 1100 on Sunday, more than 15 hours after the evening session had finished.
Numerous reports from onlookers alerted the officials to drivers who were abusing track limits at corners that are not normally an issue at Misano – but wet conditions made a difference, mostly at the Turn 13 kink, which is flat-out in the dry but not when it is slippery. The double right-hander at Turns 4 and 5 also came under scrutiny.
Officials imposed a bizarre system of a 0.5-place grid penalty for each infraction, with each driver’s total rounded down to the nearest whole number. Usually the relevant lap time is deleted, but this was not possible because the final results had been published overnight, and once that happens they cannot be changed.
With Marcus Armstrong and Ferdinand Habsburg each taking seven-place grid penalties, this means that they clocked up 14 or 15 infringements each. On the other hand, Enaam Ahmed and Sacha Fenestraz were unpenalised, as their single offences were rounded down from 0.5 to count for nothing. But with second qualifying deciding the grid for races two and three, this meant that the erring drivers went totally unpenalised for the weekend’s finale. Armstrong therefore started from pole, despite barely completing a lap without a track-limits offence, although in the end he was taken out in a collision with team-mate
Guan Yu Zhou.
Notably, fastest qualifier
Juri Vips was the only one of the top 11 drivers not to clock up a single offence – he was 1.615 seconds faster than the next-quickest competitor not to be found guilty of breaching track limits.
When asked about his regularly running wide at Turn 13, Armstrong said: “It was logic. They said they would look at Turns 6, 8 and the inside of 2. It was, ‘OK, I might as well just go there’. It was a case of send it.”