No further penalty for Magnussen but stewards call on FIA to toughen up rules

Kevin Magnussen has avoided further penalties after he was investigated and cleared of “unsportsmanlike” driving.

However the Miami Grand Prix stewards want the FIA to allow them to apply tougher penalties to deter drivers committing repeat infringements as Magnussen did in Saturday’s sprint race.

The Haas driver was given four penalties during the race, three of which were for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. Following comments he made in a post-race interview, the stewards looked into whether he had behaved in an “unsportsmanlike” way by incurring the penalties while delaying Lewis Hamilton in an effort to protect his team mate ahead of him.

The stewards said they “wanted to investigate if the driver of car 20 [Magnussen] was deliberately flouting the regulations to gain an advantage for his team or his team mate and if so, whether such conduct would be an infringement.”

Following a “lengthy hearing” with Magnussen and his team, the stewards decided “we do not think that the actions reached the level of unsportsmanlike behaviour.”

They noted that “a finding of unsportsmanlike behaviour is serious” and therefore “there must be clear evidence of an intention to behave in a manner that can be said to be unsportsmanlike.”

However the stewards are concerned that the present rules do not offer a strong enough deterrent to drivers who might try to deliberately slow a rival to an excessive degree while incurring multiple penalties. They intend to discuss the matter with the FIA.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

“The stewards will need to consider if, in appropriate situations, especially in the case of repeat infringements, the penalties to be applied for each infringement need to be increased to discourage scenarios such as those that we found today. This is something that we will raise explicitly with the FIA and the stewarding team.”

Magnussen told the stewards that “he thought that he was entitled to race with car 44 [Hamilton] in the manner that he did and also that he was willing to accept what he considered to be standard penalties that would have been imposed on him for any infringements that occurred while he was battling for position,” they noted.

“He was also of the view that building a gap between himself and the cars ahead was perfectly within the regulations and it was not uncommon for a driver to seek to assist his team mate in the course of a race by doing so.

“He did not at any point in time think that what he was doing was wrong or that it was in any way unsportsmanlike.”

The stewards took no further action against Magnussen, having already given him four time penalties totalling 35 seconds and four penalty points on his licence.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free