McLaren driver furious at stewards for ‘ridiculous’ penalty and loss of victory

McLaren junior driver Alex Dunne may have already completed another Formula 2 weekend, but his frustrations from just over a week ago still linger. The young talent, who impressed during FP1 at the Austrian Grand Prix, remains baffled by a penalty he received in Belgium that cost him victory.

Dunned had crossed the line first at Spa-Francochamps after a dominant drive, only to learn hours later that his win had been taken away. The stewards ruled that hr failed to engage the mandated start setup system at the beginning of the race. However, the Irishman insists the decision was intentional — his team, Rodin Motorsports, had opted against activating the system due to the wet conditions and the fact that the race began with a rolling start behind the safety car.

Dunne not pleased with the stewards

Dunne received a ten-second time penalty, which caused him to tumble to tenth place in the results. GPblog asked the McLaren junior in Hungary about the stewards' decision and got a vexed response. "Well, I have no problem saying that I think the penalty last week was a complete joke. I think I'm more than comfortable to say that to be honest," said Dunne.

"I think you know I understand that there's there's rules and there's guidelines to follow, but I think there are also certain scenarios where, when you're in the stewards, they're also more than happy to tell you that, yes, there are guidelines and rules that need to be followed."

"But in some scenarios, if they feel that they want to make a different decision, then they're more in the right to do that. But in my scenario, I felt like zero common sense was applied."

Alex Dunne's anger about his penalty in Spa

"So you know I had zero effect on the race, didn't even have an effect on the formation lap, which is what the rule is there for. And if anything, what I did was almost safer because I believe the whole point of the rule was for safety reasons, for what had happened last year with the start. And what I did had absolutely no impact on that at all. So we were doing a rolling start," Dunne explained.

No worries about F1 career

In the fight for the championship, Alex Dunne lost valuable points. However, Dunne is not worried that potentially missing out on the title because of this incident will affect his future direction towards Formula 1. "I don't think so. I mean, I'm the one who won the race on track and in tricky conditions, and you know I think I did the hard part correctly, and if you want to make it to F,1 that's what you need to do."