Race penalty, FIA community service for Pic
Charles Pic will have 20 seconds added to his race time in the 2012 F1 Grand Prix of Singapore, after having been shown to have overtaken another car at the end of Free Practice 3 on Saturday after the session was red flagged.
The race stewards said that the driver and team had conceded the breach, which involved Pic passing four different sets of red lights and flags before then overtaking another car.
"I have seen the information and I would like to say that I completely agree with it," said a contrite Pic. "It was a mistake on my part and I will use the experience wisely."
But it's the imposition of a day's worth of 'community service' which will require Pic and his race engineer to work for the FIA Action for Road Safety campaign at the direction of Jean Todt, the FIA President.
It's been taken as part of the new "hard line" on driver discipline after the furore over the Romain Grosjean-triggered accident in Spa. Like Grosjean, Pic is a graduate of the GP2 feeder series which has been criticised for not sufficiently enforcing driver standards and safety regulations with its competitors.
Having time penalties announced in advance to add on to a race result have not been common in F1, although they frequently arise in support series. A 'community service' penalty is an idea more frequently seen in US series such as IndyCar.
Marussia were also involved in another matter before the race stewards on Saturday, after it was alleged that Timo Glock was impeded by Red Bull's Mark Webber. However, after reviewing the telemetry the stewards - who include Allan McNish as the driver representative this weekend - decided that Glock had not been held up on his flying lap. (See separate story.)
Overall, Marussia were happy with their performance in qualifying, and until the very last runs in Q1 looked like they might out-perform their main rivals over at Caterham.
"We were actually looking quite strong," said Glock. "At least we were only a couple of tenths behind in qualifying and now we need to try and race Caterham hard tomorrow. In general the team did a good job with the challenges we faced and also the heat and humidity, which is a struggle. I hope we can do something better for them [in the race.]"
"Overall though we are very pleased with the improvements we have seen with the car generally, and specifically some small tweaks that we've made aerodynamically," said team principal John Booth. "With Timo we are left wondering how much better he may have performed in qualifying with the benefit of the extra track time that he lost in FP3.
"Charles has done well to learn what is a difficult circuit for any driver," added Booth. "His focus for tomorrow will be to race as hard as he can to make as much progress as possible, bearing in mind the penalty incurred during FP3, to be added at the end of the race. Naturally he is very disappointed with himself over that mistake."
