Will Norris or Verstappen face penalties before end of season?
F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions, including whether grid penalties could affect the championship battle.
It’s just under two weeks before the United States Grand Prix from 18-20 October – the first of six races to decide the destiny of the drivers’ and constructors’ championships.
BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions about the key topics in the sport.
We saw Max Verstappen take a grid penalty in Spa for changing his engine. Will Lando Norris (or Max) have to do the same in the remaining races? – William
There is no confirmation on either side yet – teams keep these sorts of things to themselves until the last possible moment.
There is said to be a possibility Verstappen will have take another engine before the end of the season – and therefore get a five-place grid penalty. But that is not confirmed.
With Norris there has been no suggestion of it. He has not had a penalty yet. He has used all his permitted four engines already – but the same is true of every driver.
RB helped Red Bull in Singapore. Could the other Mercedes-powered teams do the same for Lando Norris? Do Mercedes even care if a customer team wins? – John
However, RB have not admitted that was the reason for Ricciardo going for it – they said they wanted him to go out on a high if it was to turn out to be his last race, which it did.
Obviously, there was a degree of cynicism about that explanation, and this was raised as a point of concern by McLaren at last week’s meeting of the F1 Commission.
The central point here is that the relationship between Red Bull and RB is very different from that between Mercedes and McLaren.
Red Bull and RB are owned by the same company, while McLaren are simply a customer of Mercedes’ engine arm. Other than that, McLaren and Mercedes are competitors, and they treat each other as such on track, which is not the case with Red Bull and RB.
Mercedes say it is “a great point of pride” for the team at their F1 engine base – known as HPP – that they are in contention for a championship win, and point out that they are “the only power-unit manufacturer for whom customers have won titles in recent history”. This is a reference to Brawn in 2009.
They add: “But the priority is the works team and that’s the project we are all working to make as successful as it can be.”
Isn’t the idea of a Renault Mercedes an absolute farce and indicative of a complete and embarrassing failure at Renault HQ? – Jonathan
This is a question about the Renault Group’s decision to abandon its F1 engine programme next year and make its team – known since 2021 as Alpine – use customer engines from 2026.
On the face of it, the move does seem to defy accepted F1 logic and reasoning.
Most in F1 would acknowledge that being a manufacturer of both chassis and engines gives a team a theoretical competitive advantage, because the two designs can be integrated at source.
Being a customer, by contrast, forces a team to take whatever engine layout its partner comes up with. Which might not fit in with what that team ideally wants from its car layout.
The most successful teams in F1 history – Mercedes between 2014-21 and Ferrari from 2000-04 – definitely benefited from this arrangement.
The next best accepted situation is for a team to have a factory engine deal, where the team and manufacturer work in harmony in the same way but are separate entities – such as Red Bull with Renault from 2010-13 and with Honda since 2019.
The last time a team won a championship without one of these two arrangements was Brawn in 2009, and before that you have to go back to the Cosworth era and Keke Rosberg’s drivers’ title for Williams in 1982.
By abandoning its engine programme, Renault is giving up this theoretical advantage.
But there is another side to the argument, and that revolves around both the direction F1 rules have taken in recent years and Renault’s current situation.
Certain requirements have made it easier for customers to fit engines into their cars without too much compromise – such as defined mounting points.
And the chassis regulations have been made more restrictive, so it’s harder for teams to find an advantage.
And look at what’s happening this year – McLaren, a customer of Mercedes, are leading the constructors’ championship with six races to go and favourite to win it against Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes, who all fit one of the above models.
And then there is Renault’s own conundrum, wherein their engine department has been behind throughout the era of turbo hybrid engines since 2014 and shown no signs of becoming fully competitive.
In that situation, Renault management have concluded that buying Mercedes engines – a deal that has not yet been confirmed but is expected to happen – is not only a lot cheaper but also likely to make the team more competitive.
Renault chief executive Luca de Meo says the team have become “invisible” as a result of their decline in competitiveness and that Renault were behind in technology.
But the move also throws away nearly 50 years of history and expertise, regardless of Renault’s commitment to set up an “F1 monitoring unit” which “aims to maintain employees’ knowledge and skills in this sport and remain at the forefront of innovation”.
Many in F1 believe that it looks like the Renault team is being streamlined to make it easier to sell, although De Meo denies this. Renault F1 executive adviser Flavio Briatore also says they don’t want to cut jobs at the UK F1 base at Enstone.
Following the swearing debate, do teams have to speak English on the radio? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Alpine guys to speak French? – Will
To mix languages, English is the lingua franca of F1. Everyone uses it as the default, even teams from countries where the native language is different and in which the two drivers speak that language.
This is because the sport has a British core – most teams are British; it was run for a long time by a Briton (Bernie Ecclestone), and now by an American company. The fact that the governing body is based in France and Switzerland has no effect on this.
It is a very international sport – teams employ drivers and staff from all over the world. And English is a kind of default second language everywhere for all the reasons we all know about, to do with history and the influence of the US now.
The default language used for news conferences and so on is also English, even if, for example, a French journalist is asking a French driver a question. Although separate news conferences are often organised by teams for drivers and journalists from the same country so they can speak their own language together.
So, at Ferrari, for example, all engineering meetings are conducted in English, even though the team is Italian and both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz speak Italian. Team principal Frederic Vasseur does not, incidentally.
Alpine is a slightly different situation because the team is fundamentally British – it is based in Enstone in Oxfordshire – even if it has a French owner and two French drivers (for now).
So, no, it would not make more sense for the Alpine drivers to speak French over the radio, for example.
Not only that, but there are plenty of people in F1 who speak more than one language, so many people would be able to understand anyway, so it’s not like what they were saying would be a secret. And of course you can swear in any language, and it would still be offensive to some.
What’s the likelihood of Lewis Hamilton being able to do post-season testing for Ferrari in Abu Dhabi? – Laura
Zero. Hamilton is under contract to Mercedes until the end of the year, and they say he cannot test for Ferrari at the end of the season, as they have a lot of promotional and farewell work to do after 12 years together – and 18 with Mercedes engines.
With F1 broadly arranging races by geography, why is Canada in the middle of the European season? Is that likely to change? – JJ
F1 has for some time wanted to move the Canadian Grand Prix to May so it coincides with the Miami race, to avoid this extra trip across the Atlantic in the middle of the ‘European season’. This is for sustainability and logistical reasons, and because it is simple common sense.
Commercial rights holders Liberty Media/F1 have been pushing the Canadian organisers on this for some years, and continue to do so. But so far Montreal has refused to move its date.
The Canadians argue that the risks with the weather are greater in Montreal in May, that they need time to build the track in the park on the Ile Notre Dame after the end of the long Quebec winter, and that the early June date works for the city in terms of the rest of its social calendar.
F1 continues to push on this, with particular emphasis on the fact that having Miami and Canada five or six weeks apart in the way they are, with European races in between, does not really work in a sport that is trying to go net-zero carbon by 2030. But so far there is an impasse.
This topic is mixed in with other issues with the Canadian Grand Prix. In recent years, there have been increasing complaints about many aspects of the organisation in Montreal – traffic management, parking, and other logistics issues.
After this year’s race, F1 made it clear to Montreal that this was no longer acceptable, and organisers were asked to come up with a plan to improve things for next year and beyond.
That situation remains ongoing, but it’s not hard to see how F1 might decide at some point to use the issue of the date of the race as leverage on this topic.
