Key element to controversial Austin F1 steward decision raised

A new factor regarding the stewards' rapid decision to hand Lando Norris a five-second time penalty has been raised following the US Grand Prix.

Norris overtook Max Verstappen with only a handful of laps remaining in the race for third position on the road.

However, he was judged to have done so by going off the track at Turn 12 and was demoted back to fourth place as he took the chequered flag, with the stewards opting to dish out the penalty before hearing from the teams and drivers.

RacingNews365.com lead editor Ian Parkes has suggested the stewards would have been eager to make a call, not only for 140,00 fans in attendance at the Circuit of the Americas, and the growing American fan base but also for the European audience tuning in given the time difference.

“You can appreciate as well that the stewards would likely have been under considerable pressure to have delivered a verdict before the chequered flag, bearing in mind what country we were in,” Parkes said on the latest episode of the RacingNews365 podcast.

“I know from having covered many grand prix in the United States now, the US fans in particular hate decisions that are taken hours after a race has ended.

“You've got to bear in mind as well that for a British and European audience, as soon as the chequered flag has fallen, many people would arguably have switched off, gone to bed, and turned over to another channel.

“They would have woken up  Monday morning, and said, ‘What? Lando wasn’t third?’. 

“Can you imagine the furore that that would have caused? [The stewards are] Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

A solution to the F1 track run-off concern

Another point that was raised on the episode is the track layout and its run-off allowing for such an incident to occur.

“That’s a big problem now with so many modern-day circuits where it's not just F1 using them,” said RacingNews365 writer Nick Golding.

“There are obviously a lot of bike categories as well. There has to be a solution for track limits because quite clearly having these giant runoff areas creates more problems than it solves.

“As we saw during the sprint, as we saw during the race. And the question is, how do you solve that? Because clearly gravel isn't the option. Is there an alternative that can be used but there's got to be something that's going to make drivers not want to go off the circuit?”

Such a solution was raised by RacingNews365 writer and the 2023 Young Journalist of the Year Samuel Coop.

“I'm no engineer, I'm no designer, so this may be completely unfeasible - but is there not a way to have a kind of a resin-type gravel that we’ve started to see?” he pondered.

“It might be quite costly but turf that you can then almost flip to have Tarmac on.

“Is there not a way that we can start introducing something that has that deterrent on one side and then the asphalt on the other and the track just switches it over for whatever series is racing?”