F1 paddock turned upside down after unexpected disqualifications — On This Day

Three years ago today, F1's classification sheet at Circuit of the Americas was torn up hours after the chequered flag, when Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were both thrown out of the 2023 United States Grand Prix for running illegal plank wear.

Max Verstappen had already done the hard work on track, taking his 50th career win despite battling brake trouble, fending off Lando Norris and holding firm as Hamilton charged through to apparent second place.

But Hamilton's result lasted only as long as it took the FIA to run its post-race checks.

Scrutineers found that both the Mercedes and the Ferrari breached Article 3.5.9 e) of the Technical Regulations, which governs the thickness of the plank fitted beneath the car's floor.

The regulation permits wear down to a minimum of 9.0mm from a baseline of 10.0mm, and both cars measured below that threshold.

The selection that changed the result

The FIA had picked Hamilton's and Leclerc's cars for physical inspection based on telemetry and performance data suggesting excessive bottoming during the race, Autosport reported. Once both failed, the FIA extended checks to Verstappen's and Norris's cars to establish whether the problem ran deeper. Those two passed.

Mercedes and Ferrari did not contest the measurements. Both teams pointed to COTA's notoriously bumpy surface and the sprint weekend format, which left just a single practice session to settle ride height before parc fermé locked everything in, according to The Race.

Ferrari's head of track engineering, Diego Ioverno, admitted the margin was wafer-thin. "Our car was below the minimum threshold by a few tenths [of a millimetre], but enough to bring the stewards to consider [our car] illegal," he said.

"With hindsight, rewinding the weekend, we may have lifted even more of the car, but we would have lost performance, and we are here always to try to optimise our own performance."

Leclerc, demoted from third to a non-score, took the outcome without complaint.

"The car was not touching at all, then obviously with high fuel, etc. Then you get to the race, and you get disqualified for the smallest margin possible," he explained. "But rules are rules, and they are written in black and white, so it's completely fair to be disqualified."

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff struck a similar tone, framing it as a lesson rather than an injustice.

"Others got it right where we got it wrong, and there's no wiggle room in the rules," he said. "We need to take it on the chin, do the learning, and come back stronger next weekend."

Hamilton, stripped of what would have been a strong recovery drive from third on the grid, called the outcome disappointing but not damning. "It is of course disappointing to be disqualified post-race, but that doesn't take away from the progress we've made this weekend," he said.

He later went further, suggesting the grid's issue was wider than two cars. "I have heard from different sources that there were many cars that had not been tested and were also illegal," Hamilton said. Nico Hülkenberg admitted he "might have been illegal myself," while Verstappen defended the wider field, pointing to the sprint format's single practice session as the root cause rather than any deliberate rule-bending.

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Sargeant's solitary point

The disqualifications rippled all the way down the order. Norris was elevated to second, Carlos Sainz to third, and at the back of the points, Logan Sargeant was promoted to tenth, scoring the only point of his Formula 1 career.

"It's amazing to score my first point in F1 on home turf after the challenging weekend I've had," Sargeant said. "I'm so proud of this team and myself for the hard work and progress we've been making this season."

The American driver, dropped by Williams midway through the following season, never added to that solitary point.

The FIA's Tim Goss later explained why only two cars were checked that day rather than the whole field. "The check takes a while, and we found that they were the wrong side of the regulations. That caused us some concern," he said, adding that a full plank inspection requires partial disassembly taking roughly half an hour per car, making a grid-wide check impractical within race-day timeframes.

No regulation change followed directly from the Austin fallout, though the sprint parc fermé rules were loosened for 2024, splitting the window to give teams a setup adjustment between the sprint and qualifying, a shift widely linked in the paddock to the very trap that caught out Hamilton and Leclerc in Texas.