McLaren has said it disagrees with the FIA’s decision to reject its right of review request over Lando Norris’s United States Grand Prix penalty and wants to “understand how teams can constructively challenge decisions”.
The Woking-based team had argued that the stewards made an incorrect call in handing Norris a penalty late in the Austin race, which dropped him behind F1 world title rival Max Verstappen to fourth in the results.
Norris overtook Verstappen on the outside of Turn 12 with four laps to go, but as Verstappen's driving ensured both cars ended going off-track, Norris was given a five-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage.
The crux of the matter for McLaren came down to it arguing Norris was ahead of Verstappen when they both ran off-track and therefore the Red Bull driver was the one on the attack – with the original decision judging the British driver as the attacking driver.
According to F1's racing guidelines, Verstappen becoming the attacker would have meant the Dutchman was required to leave Norris space on the exit of the corner, which he didn't need to do as the defender.
But in order to get its right of review to the next stage, McLaren first needed to produce evidence that was new, significant, relevant and not available at the time of the decision, four criteria judged by the FIA stewards.
This type of evidence usually involves some sort of camera angle or telemetry data that isn't available at the time, but in this case McLaren - rather philosophically - offered the stewards' initial verdict itself, in which it felt they erroneously referred to Norris as the attacker, as the piece of evidence.
The FIA officials dismissed this as “not sustainable”, stating the alleged error itself cannot be accepted as the element to demonstrate said error.
The matter is now closed and cannot be appealed further, but while McLaren disagreed with the FIA's rejection it said it will work with the governing body to understand how to “constructively” challenge future decisions.
“We acknowledge the Stewards’ decision to reject our petition requesting a Right of Review,” McLaren said in a team statement.
“We disagree with the interpretation that an FIA document, which makes a competitor aware of an objective, measurable and provable error in the decision made by the stewards, cannot be an admissible “element” which meets all four criteria set by the ISC, as specified in Article 14.3.
“We would like to thank the FIA and the stewards for having considered this case in a timely manner.
“We will continue to work closely with the FIA to further understand how teams can constructively challenge decisions that lead to an incorrect classification of the race.”
The FIA stewards did agree with McLaren that currently a right of review procedure must clear an "extremely high bar" to be deemed admissible, with previous efforts by McLaren (Canada 2023), Aston Martin (Saudi Arabia 2023) and Ferrari (Australia 2023) all unsuccessful.
"Whether that should be the case or not, however, is a matter for the regulator (i.e. the FIA) and not the Stewards, whose role is to apply the regulations in a fair and independent manner," they concluded.
