Weird red flag and penalties leave Formula E paddock baffled

Perhaps the omens, even before the start, warned us that Formula E's Sanya E-Prix wasn't going to be the cleanest or most incident free of races. 

The start was slightly delayed because Citroen left some wheel/tyre covers for Jean-Eric Vergne's car on the dummy grid, for which his team was eventually relieved of €2500.

After that initial false start there were many more flashpoints on track but the ones that were being talked about most post-race were around the red flag stoppage on lap 19, how the race was restarted and some of the penalties dished out to competitors across a typically madhouse E-Prix. 

It resulted in some seriously unhappy drivers and team principals after the carbon shards were swept away from the Hainan island's capital city streets.

The Race got some of the reaction to the incidents and discusses how the circuit may or may not be able to cope with the much quicker Gen4 cars next year.

Additional reporting by Stewart Bell 

That lightning fast red flag explained

When Zane Maloney and Mitch Evans interlocked wheels at Turn 9 on lap 19, the mother and father of all flashpoints on the Sanya street track, it took an extraordinarily short nine second decision to bring out the red flag.

Yes the two Cupra Kiros and Sebastien Buemi's Envision slowly piled into the prostrate Jaguar and Lola from behind. 

But a few seconds later and all the cars had disentangled themselves and the track was free of carnage.

With clearly no injuries and a scenario in which the cars were still all mobile, surely a full course yellow would have been the more logical process to begin with? That was an opinion most of the paddock agreed with post-race.

"They could have waited a little bit as they had the margin to try," Jaguar's Antonio Felix da Costa told The Race.

"I think every car got out of there, right? So, I don't understand why we had the red flag, but I don't understand a lot of things these guys do." 

Race winner Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths also had doubts as to whether the red flag was needed.

"I don't know if it warranted a red flag," he told The Race. "The track was pretty blocked, but probably by the time they got around they could have cleaned it up a bit."

The specifics of the red flag call were ultimately confused too - in the sense that Formula E race director Marek Hanczewski stated just after the red flag was deployed that "unfortunately we need to check the wall at Turn 9, so we try to do this very quickly".

Frankly, that seemed odd. Not least because no cars actually contacted the wall at Turn 9. The impacts were to the cars only and at no stage was the wall touched, let alone impacted.

Could it have simply been a snap judgement on seeing five cars snarled up at the corner, and not enough time being given to see if it dissipated or cleared, which it ultimately did quickly? 

The primary concern in motorsport is safety and always will be, which is completely correct. But a typical race lap at Sanya of around 70-seconds gives plenty of time, let's say 30 seconds maximum, to calmly assess the situation. For example, if every snarl up at the Fairmont Hairpin in Monaco brought out a red flag, there would be no completed races at all.

There is a precedent for quick judgements being made by the race director in Formula E. In Tokyo last May, Maximilian Guenther's DS Penske went into a red state for a few seconds and then cleared but an immediate red flag was brought out rather than a full course yellow.

This was a complex situation with Guenther stopped in a tricky position on the circuit but there is a growing feeling in Formula E that snap judgements are sometimes made too quickly on key race suspension or race management decisions.

There was also some disquiet on the length of time it took to restart the race. There was a small amount of debris that had to be cleared from the track but no cars that needed to be salvaged. It was 20 minutes until the race resumed. That is not long in the usual practices of motorsport but reigning world champion Oliver Rowland felt "it just took them too long to restart it".

"My opinion is that they need a quick restart procedure in situations like that where it takes three to four minutes - like you see in MotoGP," Rowland, who sits on a driver's group that liaises with the FIA on circuit matters, told The Race. 

"Here, no one really knows what order they're in when they go out. It's a bit confusing, and I think they need to probably have a little bit better structure for that sort of thing.

"And the problem is with the cars at the end of the pitlane, the safety car needs to at least go on track. Then cars at least can stop on track. They stop in the pitlane, and then the safety car goes and then someone doesn't go.

"They're waiting, and it was a bit of a mess on that side. But I think if they had had a quick start procedure, that would probably be the right thing."

Penalty consistency rears up again

A paddock topic as old as the sun again beat down upon the weary heads of drivers and teams at Sanya: consistency of penalties applied.

And there were a lot of penalty decisions throughout the Sanya weekend, 14 in the race itself. While some of these warranted no further action, some massively affected races. But were they fair and consistent?

The one that was perhaps the most confusing was the one that affected da Costa - who finished second on the road but was demoted to fourth in the final classification.

Da Costa, having attended the stewards' room after the race, was said to still be utterly confused as to why he received the penalty, which was applied for moving under braking at Turn 6 and initiating contact with Norman Nato's Nissan.

He was still frustrated by Sunday afternoon, posting "can't quite understand it and there is no consistency on penalties. It makes it hard to fight for a championship" on social media.

The unusual element of the penalty (five seconds added to race time), which da Costa vehemently argued against, was the stewards stating in their bulletin that they had "further noted that an earlier incident involving similar conduct by car 13 had already been identified by race control and was intended to be addressed by way of a warning.

"Due to a technical issue, that warning was not formally displayed, although the incident was clearly noted by race control. Therefore, it remains relevant context when assessing the present incident."

That means that da Costa should have received a black and white flag for his prior conduct but wasn't. So regardless of whether he was clearly guilty of his offence, the procedure here failed with seemingly no viable back up.

Even Nato sympathised over the actual incident, one that was not picked up by TV, telling The Race that "it's not like anything dodgy where we were side by side and he tried squeeze me in the wall, I think he just he just tried to avoid the car in front, and unfortunately I was already there." 

For extra complication, Mahindra's Nyck de Vries finished fifth on the road, was then demoted to sixth after a penalty was erroneously added for a change of direction under braking in battle. He had been shown the black and white warning flag for the infraction but the penalty - because it was wrongly applied - was revoked for the final classification meaning that he was actually promoted to third position. 

All of this chaos meant that of the three drivers that appeared on the podium, one shouldn't have been there at all (Felipe Drugovich, who was later penalised for contact with Pascal Wehrlein), and one was in the wrong position (Pepe Marti, third on the podium but eventually second in the results).

It was a lousy way for a race weekend to end and will surely be reviewed to consider how the processes for the often overloaded stewards can be improved in events to come.

Overall, and in the context of penalties dished out in Sanya and whether or not they were consistent and fair, da Costa's movement and contact with Nato, which did not result in any loss of position or damage to either car, earned the same penalty as Wehrlein clearly tipping Nato out of the race terminally a few laps later. That doesn't look or feel like a consistent and fair outcome to anyone, let alone the competitors.

Can Sanya handle Gen4?

Teams were told that the same Sanya track or a very similar variant would be used in 2027 if the venue is on the schedule, andThe Race understands this will be the case.

That sent some alarm bells ringing about the capability of the Sanya facility to handle Gen4 cars. You have to say on the evidence of it struggling to run a clean race with the present cars, those concerns are legitimate and need addressing.

There are two key areas of alarm. One is clearly the tight Turn 9 hairpin which was the scene of several incidents last weekend. The second is the very narrow start and finish area. Gen4 cars are dimensionally larger than their Gen3.5 counterparts and there could well be 24 of them in 2027. You don't need much of an imagination to conjure up  what that might mean for cars capable, unlike the Gen3.5 cars, of a genuine 200mph on a straight.

Evidence of this year's race suggests, quite strongly, that Sanya will have to be changed for a next event, or at the very least the Turn 9 area extended or expanded.

Given London ExCeL has been deemed too tight for Gen4 cars to race at, there's a clear disparity with Sanya - whose flashpoints are just as clear - potentially staying on the calendar.

Of course, the cynic might suggest that comparing a track that costs Formula E a lot of money (London ExCeL) to a track that doesn't (Sanya) may have something to do with the overall view of the situation.