FIA rule change demanded after what F1 rival did to Lewis Hamilton at Miami Grand Prix
Lewis Hamilton was hampered by Kevin Magnussen's illegal defending throughout the Miami Sprint race and, afterwards, the F1 stewards investigated the Haas driver's actions
Miami Grand Prix stewards have asked the FIA to change Formula 1 rules after they were left powerless to punish Kevin Magnussen 's alleged 'unsportsmanlike conduct'.
Magnussen picked up several penalties during Saturday's Sprint race in Florida. All of them were for his overly aggressive driving as he broke the rules while fighting hard to stop Lewis Hamilton from overtaking him.
He did it so that his Haas team-mate Nico Hulkenberg could build up a significant gap ahead. And it worked - while Magnussen picked up several time penalties, the German was able to secure seventh spot unchallenged, and the two points that came with that result.
And after the Sprint, Magnussen honestly admitted that was exactly what he was doing. He said: "All the penalties were well deserved, no doubt about it. But I had to play the game again. I was in a very good position behind Nico there and, at the beginning of the race, I gained a lot of positions and was up in P8.
"I started fighting with him like crazy and I had to create the gap like I did in Jeddah, using these stupid tactics which I don't like doing. But at the end of the day I did my job, I'm a team player and Nico scored his points because I got that gap for him. Lewis and [Yuki] Tsunoda couldn't catch him. It's not the way I like to go racing at all, but it's what I had to do today."
Those comments caught the attention of the stewards who felt the need to launch an investigation into the Dane. " We wanted to investigate if the driver of Car 20 [Magnussen] was deliberately flouting the regulations to gain an advantage for his team or his team-mate," the stewards said.
Magnussen told them in a hearing that he "thought he was entitled to race Hamilton in the manner that he did". The Haas driver also expressed his belief that he was entitled to sacrifice his own race in the way that he did to the benefit of his team-mate Hulkenberg.
In the end, after a lengthy process, the stewards found there was nothing they could do to punish his actions. They said: "The standard for establishing unsportsmanlike behaviour must undoubtedly be high. In circumstances such as this one, there must be clear evidence of an intention to behave in a manner that can be said to be unsportsmanlike as a finding of unsportsmanlike behaviour is serious.
"While we disagreed with the way in which Car 20 was driven today, in particular, the repeated infringements from leaving the track, we do not think that the actions reached the level of unsportsmanlike behaviour."
But they added that they will "raise explicitly with the FIA" their belief that the regulations need to be tweaked to give them the power to apply extra punishments to "discourage scenarios such as those that we found today" in the future.
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