Russian Grand Prix – Alfa Romeo have lost their court appeal against their time penalties from July’s German Grand Prix, losing out on valuable points as a result.
Alfa Romeo have been unsuccessful in their appeal against their time penalties from the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim. Raikkonen and Giovinazzi had finished the race at the Hockenheimring in seventh and eighth respectively, taking ten points from the race.
The appeal was heard at the FIA’s headquarters in Paris on Tuesday, with Alfa confirming to FormulaSpy afterwards that their appeal has been unsuccessful.
The investigation related to the driver’s getaways from the starting grid, specifically how the torque demand from the driver matches the actual torque in the clutch.
The FIA demands that the output from the clutch matches the driver input within a 70 millisecond time frame. At the start of the race, the Alfa Romeo cars took 200 and 300 milliseconds to match the output with the input.
This regulation exists to prevent teams using their ECUs as a form of traction control and, whilst Alfa Romeo argued that this occurred because of the lack of wet-weather practice, the only course of action was to issue a ten second stop-and-go penalty.
As this stop-and-go penalty cannot be served after the race (because the issue was not spotted in-race by the stewards), the penalty was converted into a 30-second post-race time penalty.
This means that Raikkonen and Giovinazzi were demoted to 12th and 13th respectively.
As a result, Haas drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen were promoted to seventh and eighth, whilst Lewis Hamilton salvaged two points for a ninth-place finish.
Also benefiting from the result was Williams’ Robert Kubica, who took the final point-paying position of tenth place, and the team’s first point of the 2019 season.
