This is standard for how they do technical inspections. They can’t check every rule on every car, so they check just a few important ones for every car (fuel, weight, etc) and then do random checks on a handful of cars each for others. The idea is to prevent it from being worthwhile to break the rule, while also requiring substantially fewer resources. That’s probably also why the penalty is so steep: if it was a slap on the wrist that you had a small chance of being caught for, you might as well just always run out-of-spec.
It’s fair, but if they’re finding cars fail the checks, then all cars on the grid should be checked for the same failure.
I seem to be in the minority here but isn’t that a terrible waste of time? What would it achieve maybe 2 or 3 more disquals, fans are even more outraged. Doesn’t seem like a productive use of time. The rules are the way they are to make it not worth it for teams to run out of compliance cars, if a team flies too close to the sun and gets caught then good, its working. The system did its job.
Is the time a limiting factor here? I read the results of 4 cars checks came 2 hours after the GP finished. Given we have night races that are followed up with FP1 less that 5 days later (following Friday morning), there possibly a logistics issue if doing those checks across 20 cars can’t be completed the evening of the race for any reason. Possibly isn’t just a headcount issue too if particular equipments needed? There’s time needed to ship the cars to other countries.
Watching Ted’s notebook teams are often well into teardown not long after the race ends, so perhaps losing a night becomes an issue for the back to back races.
I’m not sure to be honest, but just a thought.
