By now we will have heard the decision of the FIA Court of Appeal to reduce Renault's penalty from the original one-race ban. As I pointed out in my post, Thoughts on the Hungarian GP - Part 1, it was almost inevitable that the court should do so, Fernando Alonso being the main draw for Spanish fans to the Valencia GP. But this is not the reason why the reduction of the penalty to a reprimand and $50,000 fine was the correct decision; if anything, it is still too severe given the nature of the so-called offense.
Renault pit stop
It takes only common sense to realize that no team would deliberately send out a driver with a wheel that was likely to come off during the lap, with the intention of calling him in to fix the problem in a second and immediate pit stop. Had the team been aware of the problem, the sensible and least time-wasting solution would have been to hold the car a few extra seconds while the wheelnut retaining device was fitted properly. How the stewards can allege that the release of the car in an unsafe state was deliberate I do not know.
The incident is easy to re-construct and it occurs often in the heat of F1 racing. I have no doubt that the wheelman concerned thought the nut had gone on correctly and hastily tried to fit the retainer. Whether he knew that the retainer had not been fitted correctly is open to question but we can take it that the pressure of the moment led to an automatic raising of the hand, the usual indication that the job is complete. The lollipop man sees the hand and releases the car, unaware that anything is wrong.
We should remember that the retainer is a device introduced to F1 only recently as an attempt to end instances of the cars shedding a wheel. The wheelmen are bound to regard it as an annoying addition to their main duty of changing the wheel and, when the darn thing proves fiddly and refuses to behave as expected, the temptation to accept an incomplete fitting must be strong. After all, F1 cars raced for years without them and what are the chances of the wheelnut choosing this moment to come loose out on the track?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is that it is very likely. The retainer is designed to fit easily if the nut is tightened correctly; if "it won't go in", in all probability the reason is that the nut has not been fitted correctly. But that is easy for us to work out now - not so easy for a mechanic driven by the need for speed and and only a split second to make a decision.
So it is almost certain that the incident began with a wheelman's decision to accept a substandard job as good enough. The likelihood is that he thought the nut itself had been put on correctly and should be quite safe therefore; no need to advise his boss that the retainer may not have been fitted correctly.
When Alonso radioed in to say that he had a problem with the front wheel and that it seemed to be a puncture, his radio man would have had no idea that the more likely cause was an incorrectly fitted wheelnut. The stewards' insistence that the team should have advised Alonso of the real problem seems illogical therefore. And the penalizing of what was an obvious fumble with a one-race ban was wildly over the top.
Yes, the attitude of "eff it, that'll do" has no place in F1 and the team should be punished, with the wheelman responsible dealt with in his turn by the boss, no doubt. But this was a mistake, remember - can we really expect that such incidents will cease merely because we punish them severely? To err is human and there will always be occasions when the pressure and flurry of a pit stop in F1 causes mistakes.
To my mind, even the $50,000 fine is harsh, the loss of a potential podium position and points, the embarrassment of the reprimand and the experience of the error being more than sufficient to make the team try even harder to avoid mistakes. But Renault have pronounced themselves satisfied with the reduction of their penalty and we can move on to other things.
It would be nice if there were some consistency of stewarding decisions, however. As Keith Collantine has written in his F1 Fanatic blog, there have been wildly varying decisions handed out by the stewards in previous years, with exactly similar offenses savagely punished in one instance and totally ignored in another. That is the real problem and the sooner F1 introduces a system of professional and full time stewards who understand the sport, the better.