12/07/2020
NEWS STORY
Romain Grosjean will start today's race after his team carried out work on his car in parc ferme conditions.
Grosjean took part in Q1 by exiting the pit lane and was therefore under parc ferme conditions from that point in time as specified in Art. 34.2 of the 2020 Formula One Sporting Regulations.
As reported by the Technical Delegate and confirmed by the team manager during today's hearing, the team did not stop working on the car 3 hours 30 minutes after the end of qualifying, but instead continued to work on the car until 23:20 hrs on 11 July 2020, which is not in compliance with Art. 34.4 of the 2020 Formula One Sporting Regulations.
The work carried out during this time was not under supervision of a scrutineer, which is a breach of Art. 34.7 of the 2020 Formula One Sporting Regulations.
In general, a breach of parc ferme regulations could lead to the driver being disqualified from the event.
For work carried out on the car in the time windows until 3 hours 30 minutes after the end of qualifying and after 5 hours 10 minutes before the start of the formation lap that includes changes to the set-up of the car or modifying parts of the car, a start from the pit lane would be mandatory.
In this particular case the stewards accepted that there were clearly mitigating circumstances as the team would not have been able to run the car in the race without breaking the regulations and they approached the stewards before the start of the relevant time period.
In this connection it was made clear that the penalty applied - which will see Grosjean start from the pitlane - is not to be seen as a precedent for future infringements of the regulations set out in Art. 36 of the 2020 Formula One Sporting Regulations.
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