13/06/2010
NEWS STORY
McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh has admitted that his team is unhappy with the punishment meted out to Lewis Hamilton following his pole-winning lap in qualifying.
On his in-lap the driver was advised by his team to stop out on track in order to save enough fuel for the FIA's stewards to be able to extract a sample, as is mandatory.
The Englishman duly obliged, allowing the car to coast for a while on the main straight, before getting out to push it a little further, all the time waving to the crowd, much to its obvious delight.
However the stewards subsequently hit the 2008 champion with a $10,000 fine and gave him a reprimand stating that in not returning to the pits within sufficient time he had breached the rules.
"We've accepted it, we'll pay it, and we'll move on," said Whitmarsh. "We have complied with the regulations, we didn't set out to do this. It wasn't Lewis's fault. We had a choice, we could have come back to the garage but having done so we would have been short of fuel on our sample so we chose the decision that the regulation requires us. We thought that was the dominant requirement rather than an FIA memo."
It turns out that on Friday the FIA issued a memo specifically warning teams that they had to return their cars within a set time.
Claims that the driver could be hit with a further fine for waving to the crowd have been dismissed.