Right decision, right reasons? Renault race in Spain

…what?  Issues from Hungary to talk about?  Oh, bugger.

One of those issues was the penalty given to Renault for an incident at the Hungaroring.  The team were adjugded to have released Fernando Alonso’s car from its first pit stop before it was safe to do so, and were excluded from this week’s European Grand Prix as a result.  Unsafe releases from the pits generally relate to drivers being released directly into the path of another competitor, and generally earn the offending car a pitlane drive-through or stop-go penalty.  Renault’s, though, was different.

The tyres on a Formula One car are held in place with a wheel nut, which is in turn fitted with a retaining device that must be locked into place to secure the nut.  Alonso’s Renault left the pitlane with the standard four tyres and four nuts, but only three retaining devices.  The driver was immediately aware he was in trouble and attempted to drive slowly back to the pits, completing the journey a wheel short after the offending right-front detached itself five corners from home.

The stewards of the meeting decided that Renault knowingly released their car in an unsafe condition, failed to make an attempt to stop Alonso leaving the pitlane once this came to light, then failed to notify their driver of the problem and give appropriate instructions even after he had radioed in to state he believed he had a puncture.  Alonso would retire from the race with a fuel pump issue soon afterwards, and a driver cannot be disqualified from an event he’s no longer involved in.  The stewards considered that the alternative punishment, a maximum $50,000 fine, was too lenient a punishment for the crime, and so Renault were banned from the Valencia race.

There are, to this mind at least, several reasons why that decision does not represent a triumph for common sense.

It’s difficult to deny that the car left in an unsafe condition – the wheel fell off, after all – but it is a fact of life that accidents happen, and equally that mistakes are made.  Each corner of the car has a team of people servicing it at a pitstop, this being faster than having one man operating the wheel gun while removing and fitting new wheels.  Once service is complete, a man at each corner raises an arm in the air to show that the car is ready to go.  While it is undoubtedly faster to raise an arm in the air before the car is ready to go, it’s also monumentally stupid; it cannot be driven at speed unless all the wheels are on securely, and if they aren’t, a slow-speed lap and return pit visit will follow.

It appeared, reviewing the TV footage, that only one man was aware the retaining device was not correctly fitted, and that his actions did not make it obvious to his colleagues.  In a sport where success is measured in tenths of a second, the pit crew do not have the luxury of waiting to see what the chap with the wheelgun might do next – unless he makes it clear that he’s not done, then the car is ready, and you act accordingly.  This Renault did.  One man made a mistake, which in turn led another man to assume pit work was complete.  No malice, no attempt to bend the rules, just a consequence of the chase for every fraction of a second.  Mistakes of that nature, without any attempt to manipulate rules for performance gains, do not deserve draconian punishment.

The idea of preventing Fernando from entering the racetrack is a sensible one provided two assumptions are made.  The first is that the driver receives the instruction within a couple of seconds of leaving the pitlane, and the second is that he follows it immediately.  It’s necessary to give the instruction quickly because, as this heartbreaker from the archives illustrates, you’re not allowed to work on the car in the pit lane:

Williams should have pulled their car back into the pit stall and resumed work there, though in the heat of the moment that isn’t always the first thing on a mechanic’s mind.  Renault would have had to do the same thing, and while this would have been easier for them since their machine still had a tyre on each corner, it would have been a time-consuming exercise had Fernando got any kind of distance up the road from them.  Add in to that the perils of manhandling a car bodily down the pitlane while the other cars are doing 62 mph in the opposite direction, and the number of people right in the firing line should anything at all go wrong, and you begin to wonder how that would have been any safer than letting him go.

Unless, of course, the stewards meant Fernando should have parked at the end of the pit lane, got out and walked back into retirement.  The car was otherwise still raceworthy, and while returning to the pits would have taken time, reattaching the wheel would have been the work of a couple of seconds.  Twice a world champion, the most complete driver in Formula One and a man blessed with astonishing determination and desire, Alonso would surely have reacted to news of a loose wheel by figuring that he could probably score a couple of points anyway.  All he’d need to do would be get back to the pits and have it sorted, and one assumes the team would have instructed him to do so.

Ah yes, failing to advise the driver to take appropriate action.  Your car has a loose wheel which may or may not fall off.  Your car is otherwise ready for active service.  You are one of the best drivers in the world.  What, then, do you feel the appropriate action is?

You’re on the Renault pit wall.  You can’t drive a nail into a piece of wood, but then you’ve employed Fernando Alonso to do that and it’s his car in trouble.  Everything else about the car is currently fine, but there’s a wheel loose.  What’s your call?

It’s the same call every time, and it matters not whether your driver knows the exact nature of the problem.  If the car is otherwise raceworthy, it comes back to the pits for a new wheel.  In a demo run at a promotional event, park it.  When they’re giving out the points and paying the prize money, you keep it moving.

Fernando, we’re told, wasn’t given word that the wheel was loose.  This isn’t important.  A car with a puncture comes back to the pits for the same reason and at around the same speed, Fernando had slowed to an appropriate speed so wasn’t endangering himself or others unnecessarily, and a man of his considerable natural talent is more than sharp enough to tell the difference between a puncture and a loose wheel after a few seconds.  They do feel different, more obviously so as the wheel becomes less secure, and even if for some reason he couldn’t feel it, Fernando would have the mental capacity to notice a tyre beginning to wobble around in front of him.

On any other weekend, as on many weekends before it (Williams in the 1991 clip above, Minardi at Imola in 1994, Renault and Alonso again in Hungary again in 2006), the incident would have been treated as the unfortunate error of pitcrew judgement that it was.  A fine would have been levied, and that would have been that.  The Hungaroring weekend, though, was the weekend that saw Felipe Massa struck by a flying spring, and the weekend after a loose wheel killed Henry Surtees.  Both of those incidents were unconnected, both to each other and to Alonso’s wheel shedding, but sometimes you have to be seen to be doing something, and sometimes what people see is a knee-jerk reaction.

You may want to reflect, though, that this weekend’s race is in Spain, that Fernando Alonso is Spanish and that, while Michael Schumacher’s aborted comeback might have kept ticket sales moving while the home hero was out of the running, he’s now a non-starter.  The Spanish did not much care for Formula One until Alonso made it big.  They might well not much care once he’s gone.  To have a Spanish race without him, especially one set on a dull track in the middle of a dock with little else currently going for it, would be commercial suicide, wouldn’t it?

It’d be nice to think that today’s decision represents a win for common sense, the realisation that the actions you take in the middle of a traumatic period aren’t always the ones you’d have taken with a clearer head.  It’d be nice to think that today’s decision was exactly the one that would have been made three weeks ago had the stewards present had the luxury of those clear heads.  It’d be very easy, though, to conclude that were the European Grand Prix being held at Brands Hatch, Renault would still be banned from it.