In Azerbaijan, Alex Albon was furious with Alonso after he made an unforced error into Turn 15 that caused the yellow flag.
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Numerous drivers have pledged admiration for the concept of imposing a penalty for putting out yellow or red flags during qualifying, citing the fact that such flags frequently affect other drivers. Last weekend in Azerbaijan, for example, Alex Albon was furious with Fernando Alonso after the Spaniard made an unforced error into Turn 15 that caused the yellow flags; Albon had no choice but to back off and had no opportunity of improving on his final Q1 performance.
Owing to a red flag, Max Verstappen missed his final qualifying run in Monaco when Carlos Sainz hit with the already-crashed Sergio Perez, the second year in a row the Dutch driver has lost a final lap due to a flag being thrown. Rumors of a regulation change have been circulating for some time, with several drivers now expressing their belief that F1 may follow IndyCar’s lead and implement a modification. Drivers that put out flags in the American series have their timings erased, and if they do it again in a qualifying session, they are expelled from the session.
Fernando Alonso is one of the drivers who has expressed support for the proposal, though he has also warned that penalties may extend to races. “Yeah, I think so. There’s going to be always difficulties, like now in the [Baku] race, if you crash in one corner or if you park – there was one Haas [Kevin Magnussen] parked in Turn 15. If you park there or you park 10 metres after that, maybe you have a Safety Car deployment depending [on] if you take a good position or not.”
“And then we will penalise the Haas driver because he chose the wrong thing? So we need to be careful on how we enter and how we do those things. But yeah, I agree. Especially qualifying it should be different. We are dealing with problems of slow laps, minimum time to respect, traffic in the last corner, tows, no tows. So I think we should be clever and think in another format in qualifying.” expressed Alonso.
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Lando Norris stated that improvements may be done, and that those who are moaning are the ones who haven’t made any qualifying mistakes. “I think there’s a difference between people doing it by accident and people who quite obviously do it on purpose. I wish there’s no rule but obviously when someone else does it you say you wish there was a rule. It always bites someone at some point. Of course. the people who are more vocal about it are the ones who just haven’t made a mistake just yet.” said Norris.
