The stewards’ document reached post 14 via Jean-Luc’s mobile phone, the reserve marshal. Josiane read it twice, standing up, thermos in hand. She kept one line and copied it out in biro into her file, between the rulebook and the list of radio call signs.
Here is the line, as the stewards wrote it: “A waved yellow flag constitutes an instruction in its own right and must be respected independently of any other signal that accompanies it.”
The facts, in the order the document sets them out. After the first restart, yellow flags are waved. In that zone, some posts also show physical “SC” boards. Race control, for its part, has not deployed the safety car. No matching electronic signal appears, the driver’s Audi steering wheel shows nothing, and his team confirms there is no safety car. He passes Pérez. The stewards set aside the safety car regime, uphold the yellow flag, apply the standard ten-second penalty, and acknowledge that the erroneous SC boards contributed to the circumstances.
End-of-day report, post 14. I don’t comment on another post. A board goes up quickly, with a headset on, and I know what that’s like. I comment on the flag. The yellow flag doesn’t ask you why it’s there. It doesn’t ask you whether it should be. It asks you to lift off. Thirty years I’ve been saying it to car 34, which doesn’t hear me. This time it’s written by the heated room, on official paper. I copied it out. Jean-Luc read it too. He said it was well put. Nothing further to report.
The document says nothing about a sandwich or a camping chair. Josiane noted that it mentioned the yellow flag as early as the second paragraph, and never once called it “simple.”
It’s true, we checked: Nextgen-Auto.
