ROBERT BARRIE
TRACK LIMITS AND EXCEEDING THEM – OR NOT EXCEEDING THEM. OR WHEN YOU CAN EXCEED THEM, AND WHEN YOU CAN’T. IT’S ALL BECOMING VERY CONFUSING…
More from our resident racer
In racing, preparation is everything. Preparation, preparation, preparation. I prepared for the 2-litre Cup round at Monza by watching the Italian Grand Prix from my sofa. A good race and a popular win for the home team. The so-called Temple of Speed is a distinctive circuit. There are three and a half corners – the Curva Grande, Lesmo one and two and the Parabolica – and three chicanes. It’s quick, but it should be relatively easy to learn, right? I’ll let you know after we have been there. In the meantime, the F1 weekend was also an opportunity to think again about rules and regs, including those on track limits. If the subject is not of interest, it might be a good time to turn the page!
A race circuit is like a football pitch. There are areas in which the contest is supposed to take place and areas in which it isn’t. For the most part, they are separated by a white line. The car or the ball is in or out of play either side of the line.
At least that used to be the case in racing, and it still is in continental Europe. There, track limits are considered exceeded if all four wheels cross the line. Those are the rules that applied, and will apply, in Monza. However, in a precursor to wider political developments, the UK adopted its own slightly different rules a few years ago.
Here, track limits are exceeded if any wheel crosses the white line except at corners, where the kerbs are treated as part of the track despite being wholly over the line themselves. I am not sure of the reasoning but, thankfully, it hasn’t made too much difference in practice. You may wonder why we bothered. Indeed.
Kerbs are worth a column in their own right. They protect the track at corner entry, apex and exit and, in some cases, deter running wide and corner-cutting. Some commentators think running over the kerbs is improper. It’s not. It’s allowed under both sets of rules. Others seem to think using them and/or exceeding track limits is slower than not doing so. It depends. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
The clue, as always, is to watch what the quickest drivers do. In F1 quali at Monza, some cars ran wide at the final corner – the Parabolica. It slowed their current lap, but lengthened the straight that follows and made their next lap quicker. That’s clever. The authorities were on to it and deleted both lap times. That’s clever, too. An aggressive kerb in the run-off area at the corner had to be removed over the F1 weekend after it launched an F3 car into the air. That’s not so clever.
Why have track limits become an issue? It’s partly the changing nature of circuits – they are much safer than they were – and partly the availability and use of technology. A circuit like Monza is covered in cameras nowadays. If you exceed track limits it’s almost certain to be recorded. It was all a bit different when I started racing. A marshal might, or might not, call in a misdemeanour which might, or might not, lead to a finger-wagging in race control and an assurance from a contrite driver that no advantage had been sought or gained and that it wouldn’t happen again.
Nowadays, there is more evidence and less discretion. It is a significant change. It no longer matters so much how or why you exceeded track limits, if there is a picture showing you doing it that’s that. Technology has taken over.
What about the relevant penalties? If you exceed track limits in quali you’ll lose the relevant lap time. Maybe, as in the F1 example, you’ll lose others, too, including your best. Do it repeatedly and you could lose all your lap times.
If you exceed track limits in the race you’ll be shown a driving standards flag. It’s recently been reintroduced in F1 and was shown to Charles Leclerc after his extremely robust defence against Lewis Hamilton in Monza. Think of it as a yellow card. If you do it again you are likely to receive a penalty.
Exceed track limits for a second time in the 2-Litre Cup and you’ll receive a 45 second penalty with the same again if you do it a third time. I’m not sure what happens after that – presumably a drive-through and then a stop-go. It makes the standard 5 or 10 seconds in F1 seem small beer.
The takeaways are as follows. First, exceeding track limits is more likely to be recorded and penalised than in the past. Second, the relevant penalties in the 2-litre Cup are particularly steep and worth avoiding. Oddly, I am not sure everyone in the series has worked that out yet!
Last, and not least, Monza is a special place and I am very much looking forward to racing there.
“MONZA IS A VERY SPECIAL PLACE…”