By Alan Baldwin
WOKING, England (Reuters) – Formula One will make sure the track limits chaos of Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix never happens again, McLaren boss Zak Brown said on Monday.
The results of the race were revised five hours after the finish following a flurry of penalties dealt to nearly half the field of 20 drivers for going entirely beyond the white lines at the edge of the asphalt.
McLaren’s Lando Norris was a major beneficiary, moving up from fifth to fourth, but Brown said the situation at Spielberg’s Red Bull Ring should never have happened.
“We can’t have it again. We can’t have a race and five hours later you have that degree of change and penalties,” he told reporters at the team’s factory for the launch of a one-off Google Chrome livery for next weekend’s British Grand Prix.
“It definitely wasn’t ideal what happened yesterday, that’s stating the obvious (but) it has no long-term impact because I don’t think it will ever happen again,” added the American about a situation some said made the sport look amateurish.
Race control had to review more than 1,200 instances in the 71 lap race where a car was reported to have potentially left the track.
“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,” said Brown.
“I think it was specific to that one, so I think we need to look at how do you fix that?”
Brown cited previous examples where the sport had known there was a problem on Friday but done nothing to resolve it until too late, including the notorious 2005 U.S. Grand Prix tyre crisis.
That race went ahead on the Sunday at Indianapolis with only six cars on Bridgestone tyres after none of the Michelin-shod runners started.
“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,” said Brown.
“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.”
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Toby Davis)
