F1: A claim from Aston Martin grants a position to Fernando Alonso and snatches two from Carlos Sainz

The British team demanded that they review all the laps of the race and dropped Sainz from fourth to sixth place

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Two hours before, max verstappen, charles leclerc and Czech Prez they had celebrated on the podium, Carlos Sainz had regretted Ferrari’s decisions that left him fourth and Fernando Alonso he had accepted his sixth place with disappointment. Two hours earlier, team mechanics had cleaned out the garages, the media had put away cameras, microphones and other gear, and fans had left the Red Bull Ring. But all that happened two hours before.

At 6:30 p.m., a man, Andy Stevenson, sports director of Aston Martin, crossed the paddock with a huge stack of papers, entered the offices of the International Automobile Federation (FIA) on the track and turned the Austrian Grand Prix classification upside down. A claim from Alonso’s team caused the FIA ​​to study again whether the 20 drivers on the grid had stayed within the limits of the track in their 71 laps and that, at 9:30 p.m., late at night in Spielberg, the final positions of the race will change.

The body that governs Formula 1 analyzed the 1,420 laps completed by all the protagonists and discovered several more errors. Thus, lewis hamilton fell from seventh to eighth, Pierre Gasley went from ninth to tenth and, above all, Carlos Sainz dropped from fourth to sixth place. In their subsequent review, the commissioners discovered that the Spaniard from Ferrari had not skipped the white lines four times as they believed, that he had actually done so five times and that is why they imposed 10 seconds more on him. A stick. Another one this year after the one suffered in Australia. A stick that, yes, favored Fernando Alonso who went from sixth to fifth

Aston Martin’s request, in fact, was based: Alonso had only received a warning for ‘track limits’ during the race, so he was not going to be penalized no matter how much it was reviewed. Crossing the limits once has no consequences, neither twice nor three, and for that reason the margin of the two-time champion was wide. The sanctions

Where lies the crux of what happened? Everything is focused on the margins of two curves of the Red Bull Ring, curve 9 and curve 10, in the material of their run-offs and in the difficult economic balance of some circuits. For also hosting a MotoGP race in August, the Austrian circuit removed gravel years ago and asphalted several meters from the start of two of its fastest turns. For motorcycles it is safer. For cars, it’s a problem.

With no natural boundary to crash into – gravel, grass, a wall – drivers risk everything they can, sometimes driving all four wheels out of bounds. The layout could add and remove gravel to avoid this, but that would be expensive. It happens in other circuits, but in no skipping the white line benefits as much as in this one. Hence, in this Sunday’s race, some drivers did it one, two, three, four and up to a dozen times, as happened with Yuki Tsunoda. During the test itself there were sanctions against Prez, Sainz, lewis hamiltonto Alex Albón and several more. But Aston Martin considered that punishments were missing. And hence his claim that turned the classification upside down.