F1 News: McLaren Chief Slams FIA Over Track Limits Chaos

McLaren CEO Zak Brown insists that the situation after the Austrian Grand Prix with the delayed penalties cannot happen again.

The recent Austrian Grand Prix witnessed a chaotic turn of events, with the race results put into question for an extended period. Despite the regular post-race ceremonies, there was an undercurrent of concern from the Aston Martin team about ignored track limit violations. This worry led to a protest of the provisional result, sparking an extensive review by the stewards.

Amid the chaos, over 100 laps deleted due to exceeding track limits were identified, revealing numerous overlooked violations. The stewards were forced to impose penalties for these infractions, affecting the final results. After five gruelling hours, it was finally confirmed that eight drivers received penalties for twelve violations.

In reaction to the incident, McLaren CEO Zak Brown firmly stated, as quoted by Pitpass.com:

"We can't have it again. We can't have a race and five hours later you have that degree of change and penalties.

"It definitely wasn't ideal, that's stating the obvious, but it has no long-term impact because I don't think it will ever happen again.

"I've never seen anything like that before, so I don't think this is something that is an ongoing issue at other race circuits. I think it was specific to that one, so I think we need to look at how do you fix that?

"I think where we need to do better as a sport is we all kind of thought what happened on Sunday could happen and yet we just kind of watched it happen. What we need to do is make sure it never happens again and that we do a proper debrief and understand how we could have prevented it in the first place or handled it differently."

The next important F1 date is Friday 7 - Sunday 9 July for the British Grand Prix.