As his team-mate Kevin Magnussen serves his race ban, Nico Hulkenberg says maybe the guidelines for F1 penalties need to be reviewed as the stewards “want to get involved” no matter the contact.
That, he fears, is going to lead to “boring and dull” as the drivers are worried about being penalised.
Nico Hulkenberg warns of ‘dull and boring’ races
Magnussen is sitting out this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix having hit the maximum 12 penalty points tally on his Super Licence in what has been billed as an innocuous challenge on Pierre Gasly at Monza.
Racing for position at Turn 4, Magnussen made slight contact with Gasly with neither driver making the corner.
For that, the Dane was slapped with a 10-second penalty that dropped him from ninth to tenth in the overall classification before later also being hit with two penalty points on his Super Licence.
Even Gasly was “a bit surprised” as the punishment meant Magnussen moved on to 12 penalty points and incurred an automatic one-race ban.
More on Kevin Magnussen and his F1 penalty points
But while Magnussen hasn’t said anything since his ban was confirmed, his team-mate Hulkenberg has a strong opinion on it and why it’s not right.
“Obviously, there’s a history, how that happened and accumulated all those penalty points,” he said in Baku. “But if you look just isolated at the Monza incident, I think that’s racing, you know?
“I mean, pretty straightforward, fair and square racing. I don’t see two penalty points for that, or that 10-second penalty – even that’s very harsh. I think my opinion and most drivers feel the same way about that.
“It’s a bit similar to my case with Fernando in Austria in the Sprint race, where I kind of tried to make a move in Turn Three, and locked up and went a bit wide, and he had to go off the track. But that’s racing.
“If you can’t sometimes overtake, we have to leave the comfort zone and take some risk. And then that kind of happens sometimes.
“I think in that case, my case with Fernando, and also with Pierre [Gasly] both drivers said it’s nothing, was fine. So I don’t know. It seems a bit that the stewards whenever there’s a little contact, they want to get involved. They want to have a consequence for it, which I think the drivers feel is not really necessary for every contact.
“Maybe the penalty guidelines or whatever, maybe need to be reviewed and changed, because we need to be able to race and it’s just difficult. Otherwise, it will be boring and dull because we can’t do that anymore, we’d just get penalised all the time.”
When F1 introduced the penalty points system in response to Romain Grosjean’s antics at the 2012 Belgian Grand Prix, the sport intended it to penalise dangerous driving.
And that, Hulkenberg says, is a good reason to continue with it.
“It should [exist], obviously it is for extreme cases and if drivers really do something silly or dangerous,” he said. “I think it’s good to have that to keep us under control. And so we know there is a consequence if we do something stupid or silly. I think it should stay in place.”
“But obviously the Monza one is the most recent one, it is fresh in our memory, or my memory, but obviously this year there’s been, I don’t know. They [the points] already start the building from last year, he didn’t start with zero this year, so it’s an accumulation of things.
“But yeah I think it’s good to have it in place for extreme cases, but all these little racing incidents, it’s tricky, it’s a fine line.”
The rule means Hulkenberg has a new team-mate at Haas for this weekend in Oliver Bearman, who finished P7 on his F1 debut with Ferrari earlier this year when he filled in for the unwell Carlos Sainz.
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