Steiner annoyed by lack of apology from race director

In brief

Steiner annoyed by lack of apology from race director

Haas team principal Guenther Steiner is annoyed he did not receive an apology over a misunderstanding which led to a stewards’ decision going against his team at last year’s United States Grand Prix.

A penalty given to Fernando Alonso following a review instigated by Haas was overturned when Alpine pointed out Steiner’s team had submitted their appeal after the 30-minute deadline had passed. The stewards came down on Alpine’s side and restored Alonso to the points at the expense of Haas driver Kevin Magnussen.

The stewards noted Haas had mistakenly been told by an official in race control – which Steiner later said was the race director, Niels Wittich – they had one hour to submit their paperwork. “When the race director says you have an hour you take his word for it,” said Steiner in his forthcoming book.

“What really annoys me is that when we had a meeting about it the race director denied saying what we thought he’d said and wouldn’t even apologise. And he’s the race director, for fok’s sake! If he’d said, ‘okay guys, look, I’m afraid I foked up’, we’d have been okay about it.”

Bedrin the surprise pacesetter in F3 testing

The FIA Formula 3 championship started its second in-season test at Imola on Tuesday, and Nikita Bedrin was the surprise pacesetter in both sessions.

The Jenzer Motorsport driver is currently 23rd in the standings with a best finish of 15th, having stepped up from Formula Regional Middle East where he won two races at the start of this year.

Bedrin topped the morning session at Imola by just 0.024 seconds over Prema’s Mercedes junior Paul Aron, with Hitech GP’s Alpine junior Gabriele Mini a further 0.048s behind. Less than a second covered the top 18 drivers, and MP Motorsport’s Jonny Edgar was ninth fastest despite crashing.

His team mate Franco Colapinto was fastest for much of the afternoon session. Trident’s points leader Gabriel Bortoleto stopped with a technical problem but then returned to track and went fastest. A red flag period caused by his team mate Leonardo Fornaroli crashing left little time late on to set flying laps, but Bedrin maximised his opportunity to go faster than Bortoleto by 0.322s.

Pulling…