Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas and Red Bull's
championship leader Max Verstappen both added to the repair
bills with off track excursions in practice sessions at Le
Castellet.
"We've just done a shed-load of damage to our car and pretty
sure Max didn't end up there on purpose," said Red Bull team
manager Jonathan Wheatley over the radio to race director
Michael Masi.
"It just seems to be such a huge penalty for a minor
indiscretion on the drivers' part. I was wondering whether you
would consider, I don't know, removing half of them," he added.
"It just seems the penalty for going wide... is about 100,000
pounds ($138,250)."
Mercedes sporting director Ron Meadows was similarly aggrieved
at "tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth
of damage" to the car's floor and front wing by going a metre
too wide.
Haas team boss Guenther Steiner, operating on one of the
smallest budgets in the paddock, said his drivers had been
warned to stay clear.
"We shouldn't have kerb damage destroy a car, in my opinion," he
told reporters.
"If you know it damages a car, why do we have them there?...to
know that something is on the racetrack which damages the car,
we should be smarter than that."
Asked what the difference was between that and the walls in
Monaco or Baku, which drivers have to stay clear of or pay a
heavy price, Steiner said there were alternative ways of
enforcing track limits.
"Should we put barriers around the race tracks and then for sure
we wouldn’t go in them, because we destroy the car completely?"
he asked.
"There are other places where you go off the track limits and
you lose time but you don’t destroy your car. That’s what it
should be."
Masi pointed out that the kerbs were not new, although the cars
are different to last time the circuit was used in 2019, but
said he would review the matter.
($1 = 0.7233 pounds)
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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