02/07/2005
NEWS STORY
Mercedes Motorsport boss, Norbert Haug, has expressed his unhappiness with the current two-race engine rule, following Kimi Raikkonen's loss of ten grid spots for the French Grand Prix.
Although it's unclear what sort of fuel load strategy he was running, Kimi Raikkonen qualified third for tomorrow's race, however the ten-spot penalty puts him back in thirteenth, and stacks the odds of a podium finish very much against him. His championship cause is not helped by the fact that Fernando Alonso will start from pole.
"Sometimes it just hits you," Haug told reporters following today's session, "if you look at the list of the manufacturers this year. For me, it's absolutely not the right rule, I have to say.
"It hits you and then you are penalised and if you have a problem in any other technical part you are not penalised so I do not quite understand why you should be penalised for an engine failure but it is what it is.
"I think Kimi was absolutely in a position to go for pole position," added the German. "You can imagine we changed the strategies slightly and he's now one and a half tenths off pole."