FIA bans jacks touching F1 cars during pitstop penalties after Alonso review

The clarification has resulted from a review of the Alonso penalty stop and the grid placement offence that triggered it.

As well as a tidying up of the penalty pitstop rules the review has resulted in changes to the grid boxes, which have been extended in width from 2.5m to 2.7m from this weekend, with an experimental central white line added to help to guide the drivers in Melbourne.

In Jeddah Alonso was deemed to have stopped too far to the left of his grid box, a result of extra FIA scrutiny following a 2023 F1 sporting regulation change that also impacted Esteban Ocon in Bahrain.

Alonso subsequently had to take a five-second penalty at his pitstop. It’s understood that Mercedes viewed a video of the stop and alerted the FIA to the fact that the rear jack was touching the car.

The FIA looked into the matter via its Remote Operations Centre in Geneva and after the race Alonso was given a 10-second penalty that dropped him from third to fourth.

The stewards were led to believe that a recent meeting of the FIA Sporting Advisory Committee had agreed that jacks could not touch the car during a penalty stop, violating a regulation that says a car “may not be worked on until the car has been stationary for the duration of the penalty.”

However Aston Martin requested a right of review and the team was able to demonstrate to the stewards that while the matter had indeed been discussed at the SAC there was no firm agreement on jacks touching cars being illegal.

The team also showed videos of seven examples of recent penalty pitstops involving Mercedes, Alpine, AlphaTauri, Haas and McLaren where jacks were touching.

The stewards considered this was new evidence and thus reversed the decision on Alonso’s 10-second penalty, and the Spaniard got his third place back.

Inevitably the saga led to some criticism of the FIA. The governing body decided to fast track a review of the events, noting that “consistent with the transparent approach adopted by the FIA, a thorough analysis has been undertaken and conclusions drawn that will help improve the sport.”

It added that “the review panel comprised representatives from a number of FIA departments including race control, safety, operations and technical and members of the FIA Remote Operations Centre (ROC).”

Consistent with the decision of the Jeddah stewards the review noted that “this circumstance arose due to a lack of clarity in the wording of the relevant regulations and…