Williams team principal James Bowles says he’ll be looking for an answer from the FIA as to why the lap time from Nico Halkenberg was not removed for nearly 30 minutes.
Albon struggled on the final Q1 lap and dropped out at 0.042s as Halkenberg bordered him in 15th place, but after more than 30 minutes, race control removed German lap times that exceeded the track limit on 11 turns.
“First of all, it’s frustrating because the Q1 is getting very tight. You can see the car doing three runs. A slightly better car is where we were. “We didn’t have the best laps with Alex, but today we were in the top 10 cars.
“You can see from some laps, from the FIA. They responded very quickly – Verstappen, Tsunoda – and usually their timeline should be a few seconds after it happened. Why this effect moved behind us, but it’s probably a 6-8 race position and it’s not fixed.
“The FIA has expanded its operations to Geneva. I’m sure there’s a lot they need to see. In many ways, we should be grateful that they look back at the rap that happened 30 minutes ago. But we need to understand that we can do better in this situation.
With a team that can monitor other cars during qualifying, Vowles says Williams saw that Hulkenberg exceeded the truck limits, but not flagged the FIA itself.
“We saw that the knees on his knees are small from inside the ship. The reality is that we don’t wet the FIA with the message, as it makes their lives even more difficult to do so.
“That’s one of the arguments I want to have with them. It’s okay to start telling you all the raps we think are a little, but there’s probably a reason that makes more sense.
The FIA admitted that it had not checked Turn 11 as a high priority issue, and as a result, it missed Hulkenberg’s lap until it was too late to take responsibility for the error.
“There are many track-limited hotspots that are continuously monitored,” the FIA statement read. “Track-limited hotspots are given priority. Based on previous sessions, turn 11 was not considered a focus area for track-limited. In hindsight, it should be higher as a corner in the priority list.
“Check-in in areas of circuits such as Turn 11 takes a little longer than those with higher priority. Unfortunately, in this case, due to the timing of the check, we were unable to act before Q2 began. As soon as we noticed an incident, we acted on it.
“We are building towards increasing resources and improving our systems and processes. Take this opportunity to get the wrong thing.”
Updated with FIA statement