FIA reveal judgement over Lewis Hamilton F1 pit lane queue-jumping

Lewis Hamilton and Lance Stroll have been issued with warnings for overtaking their rivals in the pit lane during Friday practice at the F1 Japanese Grand Prix.

Both Ferrari and Aston Martin were summoned to the stewards over an alleged failure to follow F1 race director Rui Marques’s pre-race instructions after a heavily disrupted second practice at Suzuka.

Hamilton, Stroll and their respective teams were all given formal warnings for violating the instructions on how drivers should join the fast lane of the pit lane when leaving their garages.

The stewards found both Hamilton and Stroll “overtook several cars in the fast lane whilst traversing the working lane to the practice start area” during FP2 in Japan.

In doing so, they breached the rule which forbids drivers from overtaking any cars which are in the fast lane by passing them through the inner part of the pit lane.

Marques’s notes for this weekend’s race state that drivers should not be overtaken once inside the fast lane unless their car stops with an “obvious mechanical problem”.

The instructions read: “Any car(s) driven to the end of the pit lane prior to the start or restart of a free practice session [or] qualifying session must form up in a line in the fast lane and leave in the order they got there.

“A car will be considered to be ‘in the fast lane’ when a tyre has crossed the solid white line separating the fast lane from the inner lane, in this context crossing means that all of a tyre should be beyond the far side, with respect to the garages, of the line separating the fast lane from the inner lane.

“After the start or restart of a free practice session [or] qualifying session, if there is a suitable gap in a queue of cars in the fast lane, such that a driver can blend into the fast lane safely and without unnecessarily impeding cars already in the fast lane, they are free to do so.

“During a free practice session and qualifying session a car driving in the inner lane, parallel to the fast lane, will not be considered to have blended into the fast lane at the earliest opportunity.”