Guenther Steiner believes the stewarding process should be sped up. He argues that quicker decisions are needed after sessions than were seen in Miami. After the
Miami Grand Prix, multiple investigations were still pending, including incidents involving George Russell, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. In the end, Verstappen was handed a five-second penalty that did not affect his result, while Leclerc received a drive-through penalty converted into a 20-second time penalty, dropping him to P8.
After the race,
GPblog explained in detail that decisions taking longer this year is in line with what was agreed upon with the drivers and teams ahead of the 2026 campaign.
Former
Formula 1 team boss Steiner thinks that a time limit should be still added to optimize the process. Speaking on The Red Flag Podcast, he argued:
"We need to decide it after the race, but I think there needs to be a time limit. If you don't know, guess what? Don't give a penalty."What are they doing during the race? Because I think the stewards are not there to watch the race. They're there to take decisions on things which went wrong.
"They should shut the race down and tell the stewards, analyze this, process this scene, what happened here, work on it, make a decision and move on, not watch."
According to Steiner, deciding whether Verstappen was over the line is a simple question. "Then the team still has got the chance to protest. But in the end, you're either going over a white line or not. It's not like it's an incident like with Gasly and Lawson. It's either over or not. Before, after, in three days, it will be the same picture."
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