FIA set to reduce use of black-and-orange flag warnings after 2022 F1 controversies

Instead, the onus will be on the teams to ensure their cars remain operating in a safe manner even after sustaining damage in incidents and then prove this is the case to in-competition enquiries raised by the governing body.

The black-and-orange flag is used as an instruction to competitors ordering them to pit for repairs if they suffer damage and their continued participation is deemed unsafe, with drivers required to come in at the end of the lap after they receive the warning.

Its use in the 2022 season has made headlines since the 2022 US Grand Prix after the Haas team protested the results of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Alpine driver Fernando Alonso because it believed they had each finished the race while running with damage, contravening safety rules.

This followed Haas driver Kevin Magnussen receiving the black-and-orange flag instruction at three races earlier in 2022 – Canada, Hungary and Singapore – after he sustained damage to his front wing endplate in each of those races that left the part waving loose.

This was deemed unsafe by the FIA officials at those races and he duly came in for repairs.

But Haas was incensed, feeling it is being treated differently to other teams in this matter, when this did not happen for Perez in the race at Austin (his damaged endplate fell off five laps after his opening tour contact with Alfa Romeo driver Valtteri Bottas) and Alonso finished the race despite running for several laps with his right-side wing mirror bouncing loose and then falling off.

Haas’s protest against Perez was dismissed because Red Bull had supplied photos to the FIA to show the shorn endplate damage was not moving unsafely, which the FIA accepted and the stewards’ agreed with that call.

But the American squad’s protest against Alonso was initially found to be admissible and he was later handed a 30-second time addition that cost him his seventh-place finish last weekend.

That was later rescinded following a long saga into the decisions around why Haas’s protest was allowed to proceed in the first place.

In the announcement that Alonso’s Austin penalty had been annulled, it was revealed that FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem had initiated a review into the future use of the black-and-orange flag.

Autosport understands that this has been enacted in unanimous agreement with the F1 teams and follows the Austin stewards declaring that they…