Drawing the line, firmly

Motor sport : Formula One bosses have decided to crack down on drivers straying out of bounds, upsetting many

When a tennis ball bounces outside the court lines, the play is over. When a soccer ball goes off the field, the play is interrupted. But when a Formula One car drives outside the limits of the track, the race continues — sometimes, in fact, to the advantage of the driver who strayed out of bounds.

For most of Formula One's history, that has been how races were run. However, as Formula One prepared for the Hungarian Grand Prix near Budapest, it was embroiled in a controversy as to how, why and whether drivers should be penalised for straying from the track's boundary.

The rule that states that cars must remain within the white lines at the edge of the track was stiffened this year, and two weeks ago the race stewards at the British Grand Prix cracked down on its enforcement. But that only added to the controversy: Six drivers — among them Lewis Hamilton, the reigning world champion who is currently second in the season standings — had their lap-times during qualifying eliminated for driving outside the track's boundary.

"It's rubbish for everyone," said Jolyon Palmer, a driver for the Renault team, who saw his lap-time disqualified. "Us drivers want to push to the maximum and we'll use everything we can. But it's really stupid when some people can seemingly go four wheels off and get away with it and some people get their times deleted."

Palmer pointed out the difficulty of having three race stewards keep their eyes on 22 drivers on circuits with perhaps three or four highly critical corners, and where going off the track can offer an advantage.

In response, the Formula One organisers are testing a system of electronic sensors at Turns 4 and 11 on the Hungaroring to detect when a car goes off the track at those corners. "It's rubbish for the fans because Lewis Hamilton is on pole one minute but then his time is deleted," Palmer said.

In fact, Hamilton was able to do another lap perfectly and scored the pole position anyway. The last time the issue arose was in 2013, when several drivers were punished for driving outside the white lines, including Romain Grosjean, who was then driving for Lotus. Grosjean was penalised for overtaking Felipe Massa in a Ferrari in a fabulous move at Turn 4 on the Hungaroring, a circuit that remains one of the most difficult for overtaking. His pass was nullified when he was ordered to drive through the pit lane as punishment.

"Personally, I don't think that seeing cars going wide disturbs the show," said Grosjean at the British Grand Prix, touching on one of the reasons the rule was put in place. "I watched a Nascar race at Sonoma and there were absolutely no track limits at all, and I don't think the show was bad."

Back in 2013, the International Automobile Federation, the rules-making body for the series, concluded that drivers could not gain a speed advantage by going off the track since the surface there was not as smooth and does not have the same grip. In fact, there is often a curb there that causes the wheels to vibrate, and the car can lose speed.
The federation said then that it was satisfied that the regulations and the punishments were adequate and that no changes to the rules were necessary.

This year, however, the federation recognised that when some corners are taken wide, drivers can clock a faster lap. At these corners where the curbs are not as severe, the asphalt off the track lets the driver steer a wider trajectory and therefore not have to slow down as much for the corner.

That discovery was why, at the British Grand Prix, the federation's race director, Charlie Whiting, told the drivers that there would be "zero tolerance" for a car going off the track.

At the Austrian Grand Prix this month, several cars suffered punctured tires and broken suspensions during qualifying because the drivers went too far off the track and onto particularly rough curbs.

The drivers asked for the curbs to be modified. But as the curbs are outside the track limits, the federation said that it was up to the drivers to stay on the track. During the race itself, there were no incidents.

Massa, who disagreed with Grosjean's punishment in 2013, now agrees with the rules.
"I am in favour, because otherwise everybody will be out of the track and we look stupid," said Massa, who now drives for Williams. "If they put the proper curbs on the outside, nobody will go on the outside. If they put asphalt, everybody will go outside."

As the series has developed safer racing circuits, it has found that the traditional use of gravel pits at the edge of the track to absorb a crash was dangerous because a car could catch in the gravel and roll. A better solution was to replace the gravel with asphalt to allow a car to drive off the track.

"If everyone is doing it, then it's the same thing for everyone," Grosjean said. "So either we put gravel - and there is no discussion of that, we are not going there - or we put tarmac, and it's tempting for us to use it. Our nature is to push the limits all the time and that's why we love racing."