The jury overturned Alonso’s time penalty after Aston Martin appealed the verdict.
The aftermath of the race in Jeddah has been an emotional roller coaster for Fernando Alonso, but in the end he gets to keep his podium. PDO
Fernando Alonso still gets to keep his third place in the Saudi Arabian GP after Aston Martin complained about the 10-second time penalty given by the jury.
The podium finish is the 100th of Alonso’s career, but getting it was the result of a chaotic process.
After the trophy ceremony, the jury announced that they had given Alonso a 10-second penalty because he had not properly served the 5-second penalty he received during the race. A time penalty brought Mercedes up of George Russell in the final results ahead of Alonso in third place.
However, Aston Martin exercised its right of appeal. After discussions in the cabinets, Alonso’s 10-second penalty was overturned and the Spaniard finally got to celebrate his third place and his milestone.
Fian the decision according to Aston Martin submitted that the jury had misinterpreted the rules. The jury had justified the 10-second penalty with the agreement between the teams, according to which mechanics are not allowed to work on a car suffering a time penalty during a pit stop. However, the Aston Martin mechanic managed to touch the car with a jack during the stop, and the jury interpreted the action as working on the car.
Aston Martin pleaded that there is no clear agreement between the garages on whether the contact of the rear jack is “working on the car”. Thus, the jury’s interpretation would have been wrongly justified.
The jury ultimately came to the same conclusion as Aston Martin.
– After reviewing the new evidence, we came to the conclusion that there is no clear agreement, as previously presented by the judges, which could be relied upon when deciding that touching the car with a jack without other measures would mean working on the car. In these circumstances, we considered that our original decision to penalize car 14 (Alonso) had to be overturned, Fia’s decision states.
The jury therefore ended up overturning the punishment it had given earlier. This puts Alonso back into the third place he earned during the race and Russell drops back to fourth.