F1's penalty system is falling short. Here's how to fix it

Nobody is arguing that the FIA stewards misread what happened at Turn 1 on lap 36 of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Franco Colapinto braked way too late at the restart after George Russell had bunched up the field, slid up the inside far too quickly to be able to control his car in the corner, locked up, overshot and hit the side of his Alpine team-mate Pierre Gasly, who then hit Lando Norris‘s McLaren.

Three cars were out on the spot. The stewards’ decision text was clear and correct.

Colapinto was, in their words, “wholly or predominantly to blame” and they applied “the standard penalty for causing a collision”, a 10-second time penalty that, since Colapinto was unable to serve it in the race, translates into a five-place grid penalty for Sepang.

Not too surprisingly, the verdict has perhaps drawn more attention than the accident itself, leading to questions about the current penalty system.

Stewards’ guidelines recommend extra leniency during first lap and first corner incidents, where sanctions can be softened where more than one driver has contributed to a crash. Officials rejected this course of action in the Colapinto case because no other driver had contributed to the crash, which was fair enough.

However, there is no mechanism for the opposite case. A driver who touches a rival’s rear wing and a driver who eliminates three cars from a restart, when both judged solely to blame, receive the same penalty.

The system asks whether the driver was at fault and how serious the breach was, but it never asks what happened to everyone else.

Norris and Gasly were forced out of the race and lost the points they were racing for through no fault of their own. The penalty takes no account of it.

There was also no discretion in the conversion of the unserved penalty to the five-place grid drop this weekend. What makes it odd is what it is worth.

Five places is a serious penalty for a driver who would otherwise qualify on the first or second row, and close to nothing for one who would qualify near the back.

That means the punishment is set by the driver’s pace, which has no relation to the offence.

Colapinto received no penalty points either, so his 12-month tally stays at four, all accumulated not for racing incidents like Baku‘s, but for yellow flag-related infringements.

That is not an oversight. For 2026, the FIA rewrote the driving standards guidelines so that stewards impose penalty points only on incidents judged dangerous, reckless or deliberate.

A driver “wholly or predominantly to blame” for a three-car collision, but not judged reckless or deliberate, now qualifies for none. Fifteen rounds into the season before Baku, not one penalty point had been issued for causing a collision, only for yellow-flag and safety-car breaches.

When introduced in 2014, the penalty points system was meant to solve exactly this. It was introduced to give the stewards a way to punish repeated or serious misjudgments without resorting to race bans, which had been used only occasionally.

It works only if points are attached to serious offences. A crash that eliminated three cars, and was judged the driver’s fault alone, produced none.

If that offence carries no points, then it is very hard to see what the system is for.

Norris, who was one of the victims, initially called for a race ban and said some drivers should not be in Formula 1, before apologising for his comments the following day.

Russell, Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar, when asked about it in the press conference, thought that a ban would be too harsh, and rightly so. Missing a race for a lapse in braking would be a disproportionate response to a driver who apologised at once and accepted the blame.

But the choice on offer should not be between a 10-second standard penalty and a race ban.

A working system would have something in between, a penalty that responds to how bad the crash was. Right now it doesn’t, as the current system punishes the rules breach, but not the outcome.

The principle of punishing the outcome and not just the action is not uncommon in sports.

In ice hockey, a high-sticking penalty that draws blood becomes a double minor: four minutes instead of two, for the same action, because of the result.

In football, a foul that denies an obvious goal-scoring opportunity is a red card, while the same foul elsewhere on the pitch is usually a yellow.

The offence is defined partly by what it cost the opponent.

Formula 1 has done this in the past, too.

Romain Grosjean was banned for a race after causing a first-lap crash at Spa in 2012 that took out several drivers, one of the few times the sport has punished the consequence of a collision as well as the act.