Fernando Alonso moved closer to an automatic ban after the stewards gave him two penalty points on his licence for colliding with Zhou Guanyu.
The Aston Martin driver has collected eight penalty points on his licence within the last nine rounds. He will not lose any penalty points until March next year.
He will trigger an automatic ban if he collects four penalty points on his licence over the next 15 rounds.
The collision occured shortly after Daniel Ricciardo passed Zhou at turn three on lap 20. Alonso saw an opportunity to follow him through and made for the inside but collided with the Sauber. “What the fuck is he doing?” exclaimed the bemused driver as he rejoined the track.
“I was obviously looking at a white car behind me, overtaking me side-by-side into the corner,” Zhou explained. “The next thing I saw was a green Fernando trying to dive-bomb.”
“I think he was trying to race the guys I was also overtaken by,” he told the official F1 channel, “I think he just went too deep and hit me basically. So the car was quite damaged after that. [I was] lucky enough to continue, to be honest.”
The stewards held Alonso entirely responsible for the collision. “The driver of car 14 [Alonso] attempted a very late overtake on car 24 [Zhou] on the inside into turn three,” they noted.
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“He never got in a position to have the right to the line and made contact with car 24 at the apex. The stewards determine that the driver of car 14 was wholly at fault.”
Alonso admitted he made a mistake while trying to pass the Sauber but said the penalty made no difference to his race after finishing out of the points in 18th.
“It was a difficult race,” he admitted. “When you don’t have the pace, you have to try different alternatives strategies. We tried the three stops.
“Then I locked up and I touch Guanyu in turn three, I had the penalty. All in all it didn’t change probably the result because we were out of the points.”
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