Fernando Alonso has denounced the current state of Formula 1, calling the sport "overregulated" for drivers and stifling risk-taking during wheel-to-wheel battles and overtaking maneuvers.
The Aston Martin drivers comments come in the wake of last weekend’s eventful Austrian Grand Prix, where a thrilling on-track battle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris ended with a contact between the two leaders and a 10-second penalty for the former for causing a collision.
Alonso himself was also handed a 10-second sanction at the Red Bull Ring for an inadvertent contact with Sauber’s Zhou Guanyu.
The 42-year-old F1 veteran emphasized the need for everyone to come together – the FIA and the drivers – to rein in the overly protective rules and find a better balanced solution to keep the racing exciting.
“Yeah, I think what I said now is we try to prevent dangerous drivers taking penalties every two or three weekends and putting in danger people, and in the past and I think this was back when Grosjean had the accident in Spa with Lewis and myself involved, and maybe it was a race ban in Monza that year,” he said.
“So now I think we never had so many rules as we have now. We cannot overtake on the pit lane, we cannot go fast on the pit lane, we cannot go slow on track, we cannot do basically anything.
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“This is probably overregulated and as drivers we feel frustrated sometimes, teams as well, but we need to find a solution between all of us, we cannot leave the FIA alone on this.
“We need to propose something that is better than the current rule. And this is something that we need to do between all of us.”
Alonso argued part of the problem, in his view, is that “racing mistakes” are being sanctioned like “dangerous maneuvers”, noting that this had led to drivers taking a more conservative approach to overtaking which in turn is impacting the spectacle on the track.
“I think when penalty points were introduced it was to avoid dangerous drivers to keep accumulating penalties without a race ban or something, just to avoid dangerous manoeuvres and putting anyone in danger on track," he explained.
"I think now we are mistaking racing mistakes with dangerous driving. I made a racing mistake in Turn 3 and I hit Guanyu Zhou and I deserved a 10 second penalty.
“I think Nico made a racing mistake, and you pay the price - or you give back the position or you have a penalty, five seconds or ten seconds.
"A racing mistake always will happen and it did happen in the past. What I don’t get is the danger involved in those manoeuvres, because there is no danger.
“This is just… we are taking away the incentive to try an overtaking manoeuvre. Because if you make a racing mistake you will get penalised with penalty points.
“So it’s better sometimes to stay behind, because they are just promoting only DRS overtakings because you cannot make an attempt to pass anyone because it will be penalty points for one of the two drivers. So this is, for me, wrong."
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