Vettel excluded from qualifying, will start last in the Grand Prix
After hours of deliberation, the FIA stewards have finally issued their verdict regarding Sebastian Vettel's stop at the side of the track at the end of the qualifying session for the 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The German is excluded from qualifying and will start last on Sunday. The other drivers under investigation are not penalized.
After long hours of deliberation, the FIA has now made a decision on all the contentious cases that occurred during the qualifying session. Sergio Pérez receives a warning for blocking Bruno Senna in Q2, and Romain Grosjean, whom Lotus released a bit hastily into the pit lane during Q3, also receives no penalty.
But the case that interested observers the most was, of course, that of Sebastian Vettel, the German having abandoned his Red Bull RB8 at the edge of the Yas Marina track at the very end of Q3, with the team asking him to cut his engine.
Author of the third-fastest time, the world championship leader explained at the post-qualifying press conference that he did not know why the team had asked him to stop. After hearing from the driver and the team’s officials, and after analyzing the telemetry data, the FIA stewards report that Red Bull car number 1 did not comply with Article 6.6.2 of the technical regulations, which stipulates that « participants must ensure that one liter of fuel can be extracted from the car at any time during the Grand Prix weekend. Except in cases of force majeure (accepted by the stewards), if a fuel sample is requested after a session, the car in question must first have returned to the pits under its own power. »
What Vettel did not do at the request of his team. Furthermore, it turns out that the tank contained less than one liter of fuel. As a result, the German driver is excluded from the qualifying session and will start last tomorrow on the starting grid of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix while Fernando Alonso, who couldn’t do better than the seventh-fastest time this afternoon, will finally start sixth on a track where overtaking is not necessarily easy.
As a reminder, the same penalty was applied to Lewis Hamilton during the qualifying session of the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix, where the McLaren driver had secured pole position but was unable to return to the pits on his own due to an insufficient amount of fuel.
Updated on 11/03/2012 at 21:07: The Austrian team announced that its driver would start from the pit lane for tomorrow’s race. A decision that will allow the team to make certain adjustments to the RB8’s settings.
