I do think that, on the whole, the stewards have been fairly consistent with this sort of thing: Alonso blocked Hamilton at Hungaroring, five place grid penalty. Hamilton and Kovalainen blocked Heidfeld and Alonso, five place grid penalty. Hamilton didn’t block Raikkonen at Interlagos, no grid penalty. Although I wonder how Raikkonen went un-penalised for blocking Kubica in Q1 at Melbourne?

I think the point raised by Cooperman is the most important – the wider issue is the problematic regulations. Some people have suggested ways of making sure drivers don’t slow each other down while preserving fuel on the way to the pits. I think the simplest answer to this is to stop making drivers qualifying with race fuel loads. As I’ve written before, it’s a useless rule that has failed to achieve the purpose it was introduced for.

Still, in a team as well run as Mclaren, you would have expected both the drivers not to be anywhere near the racing line, or at least for their engineers to have warned them over the radio that they were being approached by some drivers on their hot laps  and to make sure they were nowhere near – smacks to me of the kind of incompetence that never happened under Ross Brawn at ferrari (if Schumi ever got in someone’s way on a hot lap – you knew he damn well meant to!), and is just another example of the way Mclaren seem to want to throw away championships.

The lap requirement last year only applied to completed laps and was only used for the purpose of fuel crediting. Non-completed laps (such as in- and out-laps) could not be counted because there hasn’t been a completely accurate and consistent way of timing individual in/out-laps since 2002 (when all circuits had a fibre-optic loop). I can see such loops being reinstalled eventually, not just as a rule enforcement tool but to enable true digital TV broadcasting again. Next race, however, is too soon to hope for…

Fer no. 65, the fastest-time removal penalty was removed because drivers got differential punishments according to how they’d gone about qualifying up to that point. When one driver gets penalised one place (Villnueve against Fisichella, Nurburgring 2006) and another is penalised five places for the thing (Alonso against Massa, Monza 2006), it suggests a certain inconsistancy in the way punishments are applied, even though both of them had the same initial punishment (loss of fastest lap). N grid places is considered to be more transparent and a more equal punishment between cases.

NDINYO, there’s a good reason why you can’t find a specific clause calling for the docking of five grid places. It doesn’t exist. The nearest thing in the regulations is Article 31.6:

"In the event of a driving infringement in any practise session the Stewards may drop the driver such number of grid positions as they see fit…"

While this doesn’t explicitly cover qualifying, it does suggest that the stewards are free to use whatever number of grid positions they deem appropriate and that five places is an arbitrary number. Surely this is another recipe for inconsistency in decisions.