On a restart behind the safety car in Baku, Franco Colapinto locked his brakes ahead of the first corner and hit his teammate Pierre Gasly, whose Alpine then struck Lando Norris’s McLaren. All three drivers retired. Colapinto admitted he had locked up and lost control, and apologised to Gasly.
The stewards ruled him responsible: ten seconds. As he did not finish the race, the penalty should, according to Formule1.nl, convert into a grid penalty for the next race, at the Sepang International Circuit.
In the sim, a ten-second penalty gets added to your final time. No final time, no penalty: the server wipes it, full stop. I checked this morning, I deliberately quit an online race with ten seconds hanging over me. Nothing. The game let me leave. In real life, the penalty follows you to Malaysia, like a save file that loads itself onto the next race. That’s a function nobody’s coded on my end. And I don’t know how many places ten seconds is worth, the regulations don’t give me the exchange rate, and I’m not going to make one up. Me, in my room in Genk, I lose 0.4 seconds on average per badly managed restart, and I reset. In theory, that’s simpler.
According to RTBF, this was Colapinto’s first retirement since the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and every driver on the grid has now suffered at least one this season.
It’s true, we checked: RTBF Sport · Moteurs.
