Magnussen’s record
In the last Miami Grand Prix Kevin Magnussen has signed a record to be not very proud of: six penalties in a race weekend. All this following maneuvers deemed incorrect by the Race Direction (and not only) which occurred especially during the Sprint. For the Danish driver from Haas, much criticized for what happened and for the statements released afterwards, a risk: that of being excluded for a race.
The regulation of penalty points and the current situation
All pilots, over the course of a year, can in fact accumulate a maximum of 12 penalty points on your Super License. Once this figure is reached, it automatically triggers disqualification for the next race. With the Miami episodes, added to those in which he had already been the protagonist previously, Magnussen now finds himself at 10 points at the end of the sixth GP of the world championship out of 24 scheduled. This means that with two more points, the Dane will be excluded for a GP, and the danger of this happening with all the weekends still to be contested is high. But since F1 introduced this regulation, have there been any drivers who have suffered the maximum sanction expected?
The Gasly case
A similar episode it never happenedbut the one who came close to being disqualified was Pierre Gasly last year. The Frenchman, in his first season in Alpine, was involved in an accident at the restart of the Australian Grand Prix right with his teammate Esteban Ocon, which ended the contest for both. Running wide in turn 1, Gasly re-entered the track while the cars were passing, with Ocon unable to avoid the impact. The disqualification seemed obvious for the former AlphaTauri, given the 10 penalty points that he had accumulated up to that moment, but the FIA did not intervene with other penaltiesthus pardoning him from a potential exclusion from the subsequent Azerbaijan GP.
The last ‘black flag’
To trace the last disqualification in Formula 1 you have to go back twelve years, i.e. before the introduction of this system. Here too, the accident that pushed the FIA to disqualify a driver occurred at the start, but in that case in the Belgian GP 2012, and with a much greater severity than that seen between the two Alpine pilots. In an F1 still without safety systems like the Halo, Romain Grosjean he first squeezed Hamilton at the start, causing contact. A few meters later, without control of the car, he hit the Williams of the innocent Pastor Maldonado, lifting himself off the ground and going into touch Fernando Alonso’s helmet, who miraculously emerged unscathed from the accident. Found 100% guilty of the incident, Grosjean was disqualified for one race, not taking part in the Italian GP.
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