Heikki Kovalainen Gets Five Grid Place Penalty

Heikki Kovalainen Gets Five Grid Place Penalty

Heikki Kovalainen as added to McLaren’s woe by getting himself a penalty to move him closer to his team mate on the grid. Two weeks ago Lewis Hamilton was given a ten-place demotion for France, and now Heikki has collected a five-place demotion for blocking Mark Webber during qualifying. To say the Woking team are going to have their work cut out tomorrow is a bit of an understatement.

Heikki was following the Williams of Kazuki Nakajima at the time of the infringement on an out-lap and Mark Webber lost a fair amount of time following the slow moving McLaren in his Red Bull. This penalty means Kovalainen has been knocked back to tenth on the grid with Hamilton starting in thirteenth.

With thanks to Axis of Oversteer. To see the full video please visit this post on the Axis of Oversteer website.

6 comments

  • Oh boy…I can only imagine the look on the faces of the McLaren crew right now. As long as Raikkonen/Massa/Alonso all lkeep their noses clean, this is going to be a bad weekend for the whole team!

  • All these penalties are just getting plain ridiculous.Someone needs to sort out what can be punished by a grid penalty and what cannot be because it’s almost becoming arbitrary now how the punishments are applied.Heikki never intended to hold up Mark Webber and I don’t think he was being particularly reckless either.Mark got another lap in anyway so it shouldn’t matter.

    What’s with the video plugin you’re using? – it has a MIME type of application/octet-stream and Firefox can’t find the appropriate extension for it.

  • Hi Francois,

    I’ll look into the video issue, but in case I can’t get it to work it is just the footage of Nakajima moving past Kovalainen who sticks with him through the corner before Webber (who’s behind the pair) can get past.

    Can you view the video on Axis of Oversteer (whom I cheekily stole the video from but cut it down to just the 30 second part I needed)?

  • I know what it is Ollie now – you seem to be using the M4v video format , which those of us without seriously dodgy Apple media player software (Quicktime) won’t be able to open. πŸ™‚

    I managed to download the file directly and open it in VLC however but you might want to look into getting a FLV player like F1Fanatic has because that format will play nicely in pretty much all PCs (so long as they have Flash but that’s a given pretty much) πŸ™‚

    The videos play fine on the Axis Of Overster site by the way.

  • Ah, thanks Francois. I know very little about video on t’internet, but your comment was a great help. Part of me thinks “well goddamit most people don’t accomodate me on a Mac, so ner”, but of course, I should attempt to include as many as possible. πŸ™‚ I don’t post videos that much, particularly if I end up hosting it myself ‘cos I can get into trouble for it (in this case). But I’ll check out FLV players to see if I can improve this. Thanks again for your help.

  • Watching Q1 live I have seen the action and was pretty sure Heikki will be done for that.

    One can discuss the penalty for sure but the fault is there and cannot be even discussed. Drivers of this level, even club drivers, know very well where to stand on a track not to impete anyone on a fast lap…

    It’s not the first time it is happening to the McLaren boy it’s the second… and obviously, like it also happens to us the second time you get caught there is no excuse. I believe he was lucky not to get a bigger punishment (because it was not the first time around…)

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