Alonso raised his voice: “We can’t overtake in the pitlane, we can’t be fast, slow or do anything”

Fernando Alonso He has been the driver who has been the most outspoken and vocal against the current sporting regulations and race management decisions since last year. In fact, at the beginning of the year he even wanted to speak personally with the president of FIA, Ben Sulayemto fight to change the rules, especially to end the inconsistency of the application of the rules and to ensure that a pilot is not penalized more “for being Spanish” than others because of nationality.

The Asturian then asked “unit“in between FIA, teams, drivers and F1 to try to change things for the future and achieve rules that are easier to apply and fairer. And this time, after the accident in between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen from Austria, the Asturian raised his voice again in search of that unity, criticizing the complexity of the regulations and making it clear that the way in which the rules are applied is different from the first spirit in which they were written.

“I think that when penalty points were introduced into the license the aim was to prevent dangerous driversthat they will not continue to rack up penalties without a race ban, just to avoid dangerous maneuvers and endangering anyone on the track. And I think now we’re confusing racing mistakes with dangerous drivers.”, said Fernando Alonso in statements reported by ‘Motorsport.com’, giving some examples from the race in Austria last weekend. For him, when a pilot makes a mistake has nothing to do with when a pilot takes a premeditated and clearly dangerous action.

“I made a mistake in the race (in Austria) and touched Guanyu Zhou, I deserved a ten-second penalty. I think Nico Hülkenberg or another driver made a mistake in the race. Either you get the position back, or you have a five or ten second penalty. That was a mistake and always will be. And it happened in the past. What I don’t understand is the danger implied by those maneuvers, because there is no danger,” he argued. That is, he clarified that the fact that he made a mistake and took Zhou with him does not indicate that his pilot. was dangerous or must receive penalty points to learn from this, as it is just another driving mistake.

“You can’t try to outdo anyone”

That, according to Alonso, makes drivers more cautious when trying to overtake. So, always according to the Asturian, the regulations could conflict with F1’s goal of increasing the number of overtakings and hand-to-hand fighting, a priority goal of F1 when it introduced the 2022 regulations.

“We are removing the incentive for drivers to attempt an overtaking maneuver. Because if you make a mistake in the race, you get super license points. So sometimes it’s better to stay back, because they only promote overtaking with DRS (in a straight line, removing the spoiler). You cannot try to pass anyone as this will result in a penalty point for one of the two drivers. This for me is wrong. “Before we tried to prevent these (dangerous) maneuvers with a penalty race, as happened with Grosjean at Monza after Spa,” he added.

And then he complained about the many limitations that pilots have all the time, many traps in the form of rules into which it is easy to fall because of a mistake.

“We can’t overtake in the pitlane, we can’t run fast in the pitlane, we can’t slow down, we can’t do anything, and the drivers feel frustrated sometimes, the teams too, but we have to find a solution together”he commented.

“We cannot leave the FIA ​​alone here, we must propose something better than the current rule and that is something we must do together”he concluded, again calling for unity to change things.