Vergne & Maldonado also receive post-race penalties

After a frenetic and highly entertaining European Grand Prix, many post-race penalties have been issued out by the race stewards. With Kamui Kobayashi issued a grid penalty for the British Grand Prix, Jean-Eric Vergne and Pastor Maldonado were also penalized for their respective wrong-doings on track.

Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne has been fined €25,000 as well as a drop of 10 grid places for the British Grand Prix, after the Toro Rosso driver was deemed to have caused the collision between himself and the Caterham of Heikki Kovalainen. The resulting incident caused the safety car to be deployed, as debris was strewn across the race track. The stewards have stated that due to the serious nature of the incident, they have decided to apply the two penalties stated above.

The other driver to pick up a post-race penalty was Pastor Maldonado, after he collided with Lewis Hamilton and subsequently ruined the McLaren drivers race. The two came together at turn 13, with only several laps remaining. The penalty issued to Maldonado was supposed to be a drive-through penalty, however seeing as the race had finished before the Venezuelan could serve his penalty the race stewards added 20 seconds on to his eventual race time. This dropped Maldonado further down the order to 12th, and promoted his team-mate Bruno Senna to 10th.

Michael Schumacher was lucky to avoid being penalized after finishing an impressive 3rd, after it was initially believed the Mercedes driver used his DRS device whilst the yellow flags were out. However, the stewards released this statement on the matter: “The Stewards considered a report that driver 7 [Schumacher] used his DRS in a yellow flag zone and that this allegedly constituted a breach of Yellow Flag regulations Appendix H Article 2.4.5.1(b). Having examined telemetry and video evidence, and heard from the driver and team representatives, the Stewards noted that the driver did make a significant reduction in speed on entering the double waved flag zone.”

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