An error in the Formula 1 race director’s Monaco Grand Prix event notes led to a contradiction with the FIA International Sporting Code which made Ferrari’s protest against Red Bull be dismissed at the end of the race in Monte Carlo.
Each Formula 1 event is managed by instructions which are presented by the FIA race director before the race weekend, with any updates being issues during the race weekend itself. For the seventh round of the 2022 Formula One season, the race director was Eduardo Freitas, who took part in his second Formula 1 race as the lead role after acting as deputy in other races.
Scuderia Ferrari requested clarifications regarding two incidents involving the Red Bull drivers and therefore submitted two protests against Sergio Perez, who secured his first race win of the season and his teammate Max Verstappen, who ended the Monaco Grand Prix in third place, regarding the lack of penalties for them allegedly crossing the pit exit lines after their pitstops for slick tyres.
The Maranello team was forced to drop its case against the Mexican driver after reviewing the images, but proceeded with the protest against Max Verstappen, as his front and rear left tyres were on the left of the yellow line and that this breached the race director’s event notes.
The relevant part of the notes stated: “In accordance with Chapter 4 (Section 5) of Appendix L to the ISC drivers must keep to the right of the solid yellow line at the pit exit when leaving the pits and stay to the right of this line until it finishes after Turn 1.”
Scuderia Ferrari’s argument was that the instruction to “stay to the right”, a legacy of a clarification in Turkey in 2020, meant no part of the car was allowed to touch the pit exit line at any point. In the stewards’ explanation of why they rejected this protest, they revealed that race director Freitas’ event notes contained a major error.
The relevant part of the ISC has been changed for the current championship. Instead of specifying that the pit exit line “must not be crossed by any part of a car leaving the pits”, it says “any tyre of a car exiting the pitlane must not cross” the pit exit line.
The stewards said that based on that new description a full wheel must be to the left of the pit exit line to “cross” it. However, this text did not appear in the event notes issues ahead of the Monte Carlo weekend. Eduardo Freitas stated that they were a “cut and paste from the 2021 version of the event notes and hence had not been changed to reflect the 2022 Appendix L changes”.
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If the event notes would have been properly maintained they would have presumably been amended to match the stewards’ interpretation of the ISC. Unfortunately for the Maranello team, the stewards implied that the race director’s instruction was a contradiction of the ISC, which is more important that any interpretation of the informative race weekend notes.
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