According to Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer, “justice prevailed” with the decision to give Fernando Alonso back his seventh place from Austin. Alpine had also protested a protest by Haas against the Spaniard and, after an original defeat, was still right in a “Right of Review”.
“I think we got the result that Formula 1 deserved,” Szafnauer told Motorsport.com. “I believe that justice has prevailed, although of course I’m partial because I’m for this team and I wanted to see him (Fernando Alonso; editor’s note) in seventh place.”
Alpine had objected that Haas’s protest was inadmissible because it was filed after the deadline. “They only had 30 minutes, but their protest came 54 minutes after the result, so their protest was invalid,” says Szafnauer.
“He should never have been listened to,” he says. “And that was our argument. And I think the FIA noticed that and made the right decision.”
The fact that Haas was given the wrong deadline by FIA race director Niels Wittich doesn’t matter to him: “I don’t know of any place in the world where ignoring the rules and laws is an acceptable excuse,” he says to “Sky”. .
In his role as race director, Wittich is not to be compared with the legislature, but rather with a police officer. “Legislators make the rules, and even if a police officer tells you it’s okay, the judge decides otherwise,” Szafnauer said.
FIA looks at flag rule
One of the aftermath of the protest saga, however, is that the FIA wants to revisit the rule surrounding the use of the black and orange flag. Kevin Magnussen has been summoned to the pits like this three times this year with a broken front wing, but no one else.
In Austin, Sergio Perez also drove around with a loose wing element for a long time, but was not called into the pits before the part finally broke off. “I also think it should be better defined so that the FIA’s decisions are more consistent, because they really aren’t,” says Szafnauer.
“Sergio’s endplate came off, but he wasn’t shown the flag, but Haas was before, so it’s not constant and we have to learn from that and become more consistent in the future,” said the Alpine team boss. “So everyone knows what to expect.”
Missing rear view mirror not so dangerous?
In Fernando Alonso’s case, it was a rear-view mirror that was missing after the accident with Lance Stroll. That made the car illegal, according to Haas, but Szafnauer says: “There have been incidents in the past – I think 2019 – when Leclerc and Lewis lost their mirrors, but they kept their positions.”
He doesn’t think that a broken rear-view mirror is a case for the so-called fried egg flag: “I’ve driven 55 formula races, some of them without mirrors. I don’t think it’s much more dangerous,” said Szafnauer.
“Often you use your mirrors to position your car so that the person behind you can’t overtake. And if you only have one mirror for that, you’re a little more careful! So it’s not necessarily that having a mirror is much more dangerous . But what I’m saying is that we need to define what that danger is.”