The Qatar GP yellow flag that cost Lando Norris a chance of F1 victory

The major controversy of the Qatar Grand Prix was Lando Norris being awarded a 10sec stop-go penalty for not lifting off in a yellow zone as he was chasing Max Verstappen’s race-leading Red Bull.

The yellows were being shown part-way down the pitstraight for a piece of debris which had originally been Alex Albon’s wing mirror, below. It had fallen off the Williams and come to rest off the racing line. Race control decided to deal with the incident by use of the yellow flag rather than a VSC or safety car. As Verstappen approached the yellows for the first time he briefly lifted but noticed afterwards that Norris had gained significantly on him. He radioed that the team should check to see if Norris had also lifted. Race control made its own checks and found that Norris had indeed remained flat-out throughout the sequence.

Before it could apply a penalty, however, it had to put out the safety car as two cars – Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz – had punctured, with suspected debris damage. This was quickly followed by another safety car for the beached Haas of Nico Hülkenberg. All of which meant that by the time Norris was finally awarded the stop-go, the field was tightly compressed and he dropped to the back. From there he recovered to 10th but was hard on himself afterwards.

“I’ve let the team down,” he said. “The team gave me a great car today, easily the quickest. I’m not an idiot, if there’s a yellow flag I know I need to slow down. That’s rule number one. You learn it in karts. For some reason I didn’t do that today because I’ve not seen it or I’ve missed it or something. I have to take it on the chin. If they think I’ve done something wrong, I must’ve done something wrong. I can only apologise.”

Norris had no complaints when told Max had flagged up his offence over team radio and suggested it deserved a penalty.

“Good on him. It’s what everyone does. I would do the same,” he said. “It’s fair. If I did what they said I did wrong then good on them for giving me the correct penalty.”

McLaren principal Andrea Stella took the opposite view and felt the rules had been enforced far too rigidly.

“The sector appeared yellow as soon as Lando entered the sector,” he said. “But the requirement is clear: you need to lift and it’s the responsibility of the driver to recognise that you are in a yellow sector and you need to back off. At the same time, it’s peculiar that the yellow flag was deployed and then was removed, but actually the situation in that sector was the same: there was debris on track. Sometimes it deserved a yellow flag and then a few seconds after, it didn’t? In the application of the penalty, we have lost any sense of proportion and any sense of specificity. Can we look specifically at the infringement, at the level of danger associated with the situation, and the fact the yellow flag was removed?”