Formula 1 race director Charlie Whiting has announced updated boundaries in which slower cars will be shown the blue flags and asked to move out of the way of the leaders.
At the start of the year, the boundary in which a backmarker was asked to pull aside to be lapped was reduced from 1.5 seconds to just one second, following complaints from those slower teams that their own races were being too heavily compromised.
Now, however, it is the front-running drivers, notably Max Verstappen after China and Kimi Raikkonen post-Monaco, who are unhappy claiming with the new cars this season it is very difficult to get within the one-second window to trigger the blue flag situation.
Ahead of this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, a note sent by the FIA race director to the teams with the stewards meeting in the middle regarding the two boundaries with blue flags now to be shown when a lead car is within 1.2 seconds of a backmarker.
The impact of the change will be evaluated with a decision on whether or not to retain the new guidelines coming before the following race in Austria.
