Nico Rosberg says he was surprised to get a penalty for forcing Max Verstappen off track during the German GP.
The Mercedes driver was handed a five-second penalty, which actually stretched out to over eight seconds because the team messed up the timing process after an apparent stopwatch failure in the pit. Rosberg eventually finished fourth.
“It was racing,” said Rosberg. “I was really ecstatic at the time, because I was like wow that was awesome, because I came from miles behind. And very happy to get the position, because that would have meant second place at least, damage limitation and that sort of thing. I was surprised to get a penalty for it.”
Regarding the extra delay, he said: “At the time it wasn’t frustrating, because I didn’t know. It felt like I was sitting there forever. Now in hindsight not that frustrating either, because there were so many things went wrong today, and that was one more small thing, which actually didn’t make a difference in the end, because I wouldn’t have been able to get the Red Bulls anyway, because they were on the supersofts, and they lasted pretty well in that stint, so that didn’t make a difference.”
It’s always been the responsibility of the team, and not the FIA, to monitor pit time penalties, and it’s usually done by the team manager with a standard handheld stopwatch. However, on this occasion when the usual process failed, the team left a safe margin to ensure that the required time had elapsed.
“Even in an F1 team with all the high tech, if you get to take out the instruments you don’t usually use, like a stopwatch, they can fail,” said team boss Toto Wolff. “The stopwatch didn’t start properly, and once we realized, we had to take it safe. And this is why it took longer than normal.”
Wolff said it was not a human error: “It was a stopwatch failure. The damn thing failed, it didn’t function like it should have done. We could have counted, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, but we relied on the stopwatch, and it let us down.”
