Ferrari fined after Hungarian GP

FIA stewards Garry Connelly, Jose Abed and Allan McNish and national steward Lajos Herczeg had a busy Sunday evening at the Hungaroring, examining race incidents from the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Ferrari were fined €15,000 for a breach of Article 27.5(b) of the 2013 Formula One Sporting Regulations after Fernando Alonso activated his DRS while not less than one second behind another competitor in the DRS zone. Having received a report from the FIA technical delegate, the stewards examined electronic data and spoke to the driver and team representatives.

Ferrari acknowledged that their DRS enabling system was not switched into its race setting and was left in a pre-race mode. On three occasions Alonso activated the system in breach of the regulations, having been given the activation tone.

The stewards determined Alonso had accrued a very small sporting advantage (less than one second across the race distance) but also accepted he had been correspondingly unable to use his DRS on every legitimate occasion.

Studying another incident, the stewards found Lotus driver Romain Grosjean to be at fault, having collided with McLaren’s Jenson Button while attempting a pass at Turn Six. Deemed to have caused a collision, as defined in Article 16.1 of the Sporting Regulations. Grosjean was penalised with a drive-through penalty which, when imposed after the race, saw 20 seconds added to his elapsed race time. Grosjean had also been given a drive-through penalty during the race for a separate incident, in which he was deemed to have gone entirely off-circuit when overtaking Ferrari’s Felipe Massa, thus breaching Article 20.2 of the Sporting Regulations.