Formula 1 rookie Zhou Guanyu will start Sunday’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix from the pitlane after his Alfa Romeo team completed repairs and made modifications to his car following a collision in Saturday’s sprint race.
Zhou, who started his first F1 sprint race from 14th place, was involved in an opening lap collision with the AlphaTauri of Pierre Gasly.
The incident was noted but the stewards quickly deemed that no investigation was necessary.
But his team had to conduct repairs to Zhou’s extensively damaged Alfa Romeo following the sprint race, incurring a pitlane start penalty.
“In repairing Car 24 subsequent to the sprint session, car 24 was found to have breached article 40.6 of the FIA Formula 1 sporting regulations as the car used during the sprint session was not covered and ready for FIA seals within two hours of the sprint session,” the statement from the stewards read.
“Furthermore, in breach of article 40.9, the Competitor was found to have continued to work on the car unsupervised while under parc ferme conditions.
“The competitor admitted that modifications were made to the car.
“In any event, given the lack of supervision, the stewards would have been entitled to draw an inference that modifications were made to the car and/or changes were made to the set-up of the suspension while the car was to have been held under parc ferme conditions.”
This will have allowed Alfa Romeo to pick a set-up based on data gathered in both FP2 and qualifying, while the rest of the field had to base their set-ups on FP1 alone, before they were locked into parc ferme regulations ahead of qualifying on Friday afternoon.
