Picture Credit: Twitter
Italian American driver Daniel Ricciardo has been reportedly handed a three-place grid penalty for impeding Alpine's Esteban Ocon in qualifying. Due to an unfortunate penalty, the McLaren driver will have to start 14th on Sunday and was also handed a penalty point on his licence. Ocon approached Turn 9 on a flying lap, and it was then he was briefly impeded by Ricciardo, who was on an out-lap.
However, the incident forced the Alpine driver to abort his lap, although it did not affect his qualifying result of P5. Post-qualifying race, Ricciardo said that he was unaware of Ocon's presence as he was not informed about the same by his team and by the time he saw Alpine, "it was too late." The working-based outfit admitted its mistake and received a €10,000 fine for not informing its driver.
FIA, in its report said, "The driver has admitted that he was not informed by his team and was unaware that Car 21 was coming on a fast lap. Even team representative admitted that they had made an error in not warning their driver about Car 31 approach."
In its reports, FIA further stated that Ocon has claimed that he was interrupted due to unnecessarily being impeded by Car 3. However, Ocon admitted that the aborted lap did not impact his performance. Yet, the stewards ruled the above "irrelevant" and handed Ricciardo a three-place penalty and one penalty point. McLaren has been given a 10,000 EUR fine for the incident. Guanyu Zhou and Lance Stroll moved further, while Schumacher suffered a heavy crash during Q2 of qualifying had to be taken to the hospital for medical examination.
Haas notified that German would not compete in the race; as no reserve is allowed to participate in a race without having driven at least one practice session. This implies that Haas will only appear at the start tomorrow with Kevin Magnussen.
Additionally, Schumacher's unfortunate crash moved Lewis Hamilton to two spots, and he is now on P14. Hamilton finished the qualifying race on P16 and did not proceed to Q2. At the same time, Toto Wolff informed the media that Mercedes would work on the set-up of its car, which could mean that Hamilton would start from the pit lane.