Round 4 post Feature Race penalties

Following today’s Round 4 Feature Race at the Circuit de Monaco, it was discovered during Parc Fermé checks that the car of Luca Ghiotto was using rack stops of a thickness that did not comply with Article 2 of the 2019 FIA Formula 2 Championship Technical Regulations and Page 75 of the Dallara User Manual.

As a consequence, the UNI-Virtuosi Racing driver has been disqualified from the results and thus loses second place. This effectively promotes Nobuharu Matsushita to P2 and Sérgio Sette Câmara to third. Anthoine Hubert now classifies eighth and will start from reverse pole position on tomorrow’s Sprint Race starting grid alongside Louis Delétraz.

Ghiotto has been permitted to start tomorrow’s race from the last position of the grid.

Moreover, the Stewards have given Mahaveer Raghunathan a Drive Through penalty after it was found that the MP Motorsport driver had made avoidable contact with Jack Aitken at Turn 7.

This penalty was converted to a 20 seconds time penalty which was added to the total race time of Raghunathan. The driver had originally classified P15.

Finally, the provisional results of Race 1 are protested because the grid order for the restart behind the safety car following the red flag period was not established according to Article 42 of the 2019 FIA F2 Sporting Regulations. The protest is well founded and the protester did not act in bad faith. The protest deposit is returned to the Competitor and the stewards take no further action.

Upon receipt of the protest, the Stewards investigated the matter in depth with the Race Director, Race Control personnel and Timing personnel. In the course of this investigation it was revealed that Race 1 was suspended with a red flag that was not preceded by a safety car. The cars were subsequently correctly assembled in the pit lane under Article 41.3 of the aforementioned Sporting Regulations.

In preparation for the restart, the cars were properly re-ordered in the pit lane in the order they crossed the last timing loop prior to the red flag period. A decision was subsequently made not to further adjust the restart order.

Article 42.3 of the 2019 FIA F2 Sporting Regulations specifies the manner in which the restart order is to be re-established at the restart. That process was not executed in that those cars originally in pit lane ahead of the leader as well as lapped cars were not allowed to transit the course and join the restart order at the rear. While this procedure negatively impacted the remainder of the race by putting significantly more cars down a lap than would otherwise have been the case, the Stewards find no equitable method to resolve this error and accordingly leave the results from Race 1 as they stand.