Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd
Formula 2’s stewards were busy on Sunday, issuing post-race penalties for the feature race and also rejecting Campos Racing’s appeal of a sprint race penalty.
Isack Hadjar won both races on-the-road, but lost the sprint race victory on Saturday to a 10-second penalty for making contact with his Campos team-mate Pepe Marti at the start. The incident also led to two penalty points being put on Hadjar’s license.
Campos then lodged an appeal of the penalty, and Hadjar was still awaiting the result of that after finishing the next day’s feature race in first place.
“Honestly, I’m not too concerned about that. I’m not putting any focus on that,” Hadjar said of the appeal. “I think my weekend is complete. Now if they managed to give us the win back, it’s great, if they don’t it’s okay as well because I felt like I won both races and that’s the most important thing.”
During the hearing of their appeal, Campos showed that Hadjar’s maximum steering angle before the crash was “only 10 degrees, just enough to try to overtake and not block someone coming from behind”.
The team also pointed out that video evidence showed that the car of Virtuosi Racing’s Gabriel Bortoleto, which also got caught up in the incident, was “pointing towards the left of the track” and therefore in the direction of Marti. This was evidence that Campos was unable to provide to the stewards in time for their original decision due to a “malfunction on the USB” stick containing the data from Hadjar’s car.
It was not until five hours later that the stewards published their decision, and it was a dismissal of Campos’s request for an appeal on the grounds of the team not paying the deposit on time when they submitted their request and for not providing any “significant and relevant new” evidence.
The stewards’ other decisions regarded incidents in the feature race. The first of those was a collision between ART Grand Prix’s Zak O’Sullivan and Trident Roman Stanek at the start, which has led to O’Sullivan getting a five-place grid penalty for the next race and two penalty points on his license. Marti also got two penalty points for a clash with Prema’s Ollie Bearman, and had a 10s penalty applied to his race time as soon as the chequered flag fell.
MP Motorport’s Franco Colapinto has been disqualified from seventh place after he “did not engage the start set-up procedure” for the start, despite using it as required on the formation lap. His removal from the race results earns DAMS’ Jak Crawford two points since he scores one for moving up to 10th place and another for having set the fastest lap (which did not deliver points when he was classified 11th).
A five-second penalty and a penalty point were issued to PHM Racing’s Joshua Duerksen for making contact with O’Sullivan, but since Duerksen was a retiree his penalty will be converted into a three-place grid drop for the next race.