(Motorsports news) There has been consistent track limit abuse by drivers in Turns 9 and 10 of the Red Bull Ring flooded in the Austrian GP Formula 1 race past weekend,= the FIA managers with incidents to review. On Sunday afternoon the FIA had to look at over 1,200 potential violations to determine if drivers deserved to be penalised.  That manual procedure took over four hours after the race and resulted in a rectified classification with Carlos Sainz Jr., Lewis Hamilton, and Pierre Gasly among the drivers demoted long after the race had finished.

While the ridiculous outcome provoked talk over how the Spielberg circuit’s track design can be improved to avoid a repeat, Brown also supposes Formula 1 could do a better job of reacting to developing problems before a race weekend. During Friday’s qualifying, a total of 47 laps were eliminated for transcending track limits, meaning that there was a clear warning that the issue could also affect the race and that a pragmatic, temporary solution could be found to tweak the way track limits were going to be policed.

“I think where we need to do a better job is, we knew this was going to be a problem on Friday, The other one was evidently tyres at Indianapolis, we knew that was a problem on Friday. But it was a big problem on Saturday and we watched it unfold on Sunday So, I think where we need to do better as a sport, is we all kind of thought what happened Sunday could happen. And yet we just kind of watched it happen in Formula 1.” Brown commented.

Brown did praise Formula 1’s “gutsy” judgment to consistently continue counting every offence after the race, even if it would cause a lot of distress. The stewards concluded dishing out 12 track limits penalties to eight drivers after Aston Martin successfully opposed the provisional result.

Brown quoted saying, “We need to look at multifarious technologies because we were reaching 5-7 lap delays. So, what do you do on the last lap? if someone goes over the track limits, there’s probably not enough technology that can move swiftly enough. What we need to do is make sure it never happens again and do a proper debrief. And understand how we could have prevented it in the first place or handled it differently.”

“I’ll give hats off to Formula 1 for preaching the issue. I think it would have been manageable to go: ‘This is going to create a lot of noise. Let’s just kind of get it right next time. But for them to kind of put their hand up and say these penalties need to be addressed, I thought that was a bit of a brave conclusion. But we can’t have it again, the net-net is we can’t have a race that five hours later you have that degree of change of penalties.” Brown added in the end.

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