Williams team principal James Vowles says he will seek answers from the FIA over why a lap time from Nico Hulkenberg wasn’t deleted for nearly 30 minutes and cost Alex Albon a place in Q2 at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Albon struggled on his final Q1 lap and dropped out by 0.042s as Hulkenberg edged him for15th place, but over 30 minutes later race control deleted the German’s lap time for exceeding track limits at Turn 11. By then Q2 had already been completed, so Albon had been unable to take part in the rest of the qualifying session and Vowles wants to know why the deletion took so long.
“First of all it’s frustrating, because Q1 is ever-so tight now, you can see cars do three runs, the cars that are slightly better do two — that’s where we were,” Vowles told SiriusXM. “We didn’t get the best lap with Alex, but it was a top-10 car today.
“Some of the laps, you can see from the FIA, they were very quick to respond on — [Max] Verstappen, [Yuki] Tsunoda — and typically their timeline should be seconds after it happens. Good question on why this one wasn’t because the impact is: brilliant, he’s moved behind us, but that’s of no bearing to the fact that we’re probably six to eight races out of position, and that hasn’t been corrected, and it won’t be corrected either for tomorrow.
“The FIA have expanded their operations to Geneva — I’m sure that there’s a lot that they’re having to look at, and in many regards we should be thankful that they looked back at a lap that happened 30 minutes prior. But we need to understand from them what can be done better in this circumstance, because the impact isn’t one position anymore, it’s quite significant.”
With teams able to monitor other cars during qualifying, Vowles says Williams had seen that Hulkenberg was close to exceeding track limits but had not flagged it to the FIA itself.
“We saw that his lap, from the onboard — which is all that we have available to us — was marginal. The reality part of it is we don’t swamp the FIA with messages because to do so would make their life more difficult. We trust that they are going through the process as we were.
“That’s one of the discussions I want to have with them. I’m OK to go back to start telling you all of the laps we think are marginal, but perhaps there’s a reason behind this that will make a lot more sense, and if there is then we can all put it to bed and move on.”
The FIA admitted it had not been checking Turn 11 as a matter of high priority, and as a result missed Hulkenberg’s lap until it was too late, taking responsibility for the error.
“There are a number of track limit hot spots which are monitored continuously live,” an FIA statement read. “Track limit hot spots are given precedence. Based on previous sessions, Turn 11 was not deemed to be an area of focus for track limits. In hindsight, it should have been higher on our priority list as a corner.
“Checks in areas of the circuit such as Turn 11 take a bit longer than those of a high priority. Unfortunately, in this case due to the timing of the check it was not possible to act before the start of Q2. As soon as we became aware of the incident, we acted on it.
“We are building towards increased resources and improved systems and processes. On this occasion, we got it wrong.”
Updated with the FIA statement
