Little-known F1 pits speeding rule change caused Lewis Hamilton penalty | F1 | Sport

Add Ferrari‘s costly decision to pit both their drivers under a Virtual Safety Car late on which gifted third place to Kimi Antonelli, and Vasseur was left frustrated. The Frenchman fumed: “This is not a good result at all. We cannot be satisfied with this. We made too many mistakes today, beginning with the two starts.

“Then we lost a position on the track to [Max] Verstappen and we made mistakes during the pit stops. When you are one-two on Friday you expect much more than P4 and P5. Everything went wrong. For sure, we had to do a much better job. I think the execution was very poor.”

Hamilton has now received four penalties in his last three race weekends and is 50 points adrift of championship leader Antonelli heading into the summer break. On the radio after Sunday’s race he made a pointed comment: “Every opportunity I give those stewards… every single time they give me a penalty.” Though Hamilton did later concede that he has been giving the stewards reasons to punish him in recent weeks.

The Ferrari chief said: “The limit was 80[km/h], but the FIA agree to 80.05 and we did 80.06.” As the Frenchman said, that is just a tiny bit over the leeway afforded by the stewards on these matters. They have been more strict in the last few years having previously allowed up to 0.9kph over the pit lane limit, but the tolerance was greatly reduced after it became clear that teams were pushing it as far as they could.

In the bigger picture, though, Ferrari boss Vasseur is not worried about the seven-time world champion’s disciplinary record of late. He said: “It’s difficult to put all the penalties in the same basket. For me, the accident with Russell [at Spa], it’s a race incident. If he has to do it again, I would ask him to do exactly the same, because he can’t go on the kerb.

“Today, it’s probably a succession of mistakes. He locked the wheel in the pitstop, that we lost a couple of tenths during the pit stop, and then he probably was trying to be optimum on the pitlane release, and he was a bit too early than the optimum. I think when you start to do a mistake, it’s quite easy to do more than one, and this weekend is a good example of that.”