dr-baker wrote:Ataxia wrote:Rosberg's been handed a 10 second penalty, and as a result drops to P3. However, considering he may have well retired with that gearbox issue, it seems like an astute call by the team and he still comes out in the championship lead (albeit with just one point ahead of Hamilton).
A 10-second penalty that guarantees a points finish (and, in this case, a podium)? Sounds like it's worth doing.
Asked what would have happened if the message had not been relayed, Wolff said: "It would have been stuck in seventh gear and that would have been the end, probably."
Silverstone is a rather high speed track, right? Schumacher managed to finish a bigger proportion of the 1994 Spanish GP in 5th gear. Rosberg might have struggled on the section that leads onto the Wellington straight, but would probably still have finished on the podium regardless. Might even have cost him more than 10 seconds, though.
I think that it would have cost him quite a bit more than that - his lap time on lap 46, which I think was the lap where he had that issue, was over 3 seconds slower than his previous one, and he was only really affected for around a third of the lap.
If Rosberg had been able to limp home to the finish setting times that were around 3-4s a lap off the pace, he probably would have been passed by Verstappen and Ricciardo. However, given how far behind Kimi was at the time - around 56 seconds behind Rosberg - he could have afforded to lose around double that and still held onto 4th place.
I can only assume that they were more worried about the prospect of a gearbox failure - asides from the loss of the podium, it would have also meant a gearbox penalty at the Hungarian GP, one of the hardest venues to try and recover from a grid penalty at in dry conditions.
Fetzie wrote:If 10 seconds is all you get for that kind of radio message, I can see quite a few of them happening in the future.
I am inclined to agree with you there and, now the precedent has been set, we are going to start to see more teams openly challenge the radio restrictions now.
I guess that the stewards did not want to take too hard a line in case they were perceived as influencing the WDC but, when the potential time and points loss would have a larger impact, I expect most teams will quite happily take the risk and give the order to their driver.
[Edit] And right on cue, Horner has come out and said exactly that - if the penalty is relatively mild, then the teams are now just going to strategically break the rule:
"What will be interesting to see is the precedent that the stewards now come up with, because if if it just a five-second penalty or a reprimand, then it is all fair game for the rest of the year," said Horner.
"There will be loads of messages that will take into account whether it is worth five seconds or not, or a reprimand to give to the car.
http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/horne ... 53295&em=1However, it seems that Mercedes have now decided to lodge an appeal against the decision by the stewards to penalise Rosberg.
http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/merce ... 53295&em=1I wonder if Mercedes really will go through with the appeal though - given that the resultant penalty has had a fairly mild effect, would they really want to risk having a harsher penalty being applied at an appeal hearing?
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