Teams must now pit or retire the car if they inform driver of a failure
Thursday 21 July 2016 12:14, UK
The FIA has tightened radio communication limits for F1 teams following the controversy of Nico Rosberg's 10-second penalty at the British GP.
Rosberg was demoted to third place after Mercedes were adjudged to have breached the new-for-2016 rules when instructing the German how to find a solution to a gearbox failure. Stewards were, however, content that Rosberg's team were allowed to inform him of the failure itself without any further issue.
But after race director Charlie Whiting was said to have claimed that the "honeymoon period was over" regarding the lack of severe punishment for breaking the rules, the FIA has revised its stance.
From now on, if a team warns a driver that there is a problem with the car, this must be followed by an immediate pitstop to rectify the issue, or retirement.
Part of the statement, issued ahead of the Hugnarian GP, read: "With the indication of a problem with the car, any message of this sort must include an irreversible instruction to enter the pits to rectify the problem or to retire the car."
In this instance, Rosberg could have been told to "shift through" the gearbox in order to avoid seventh gear, but he must have pitted straight after or stopped his Silverstone charge.
There were concerns that a 10-second penalty wasn't hefty enough from the FIA, with teams possibly considering taking the punishment if they felt there was more time to be lost by not sending a failure message to their driver.
Force India, for example, did not tell their drivers about brake failure at the Austrian GP in fear of breaching the rules.
The FIA has also ruled that teams can only instruct drivers about settings in the car if it is to fix a critical problem and not to enhance performance.
"Instructions to select driver defaults, this must be for the sole purpose of mitigating loss of function of a sensor, actuator or controller whose degradation or failure was not detected and handled by the onboard software," they say.
"It will be the responsibility of any team giving any such instruction to satisfy the FIA technical delegate that this was the case and that any new setting chosen in this way did not enhance the performance of the car beyond that prior to the loss of function (see Article 8.2.4 of the Technical Regulations)."
Furthermore, drivers are only allowed to be told about broken bodywork rather than components, while the FIA radio rules only apply when the car is out of the pitlane - as opposed to the previous garage restriction.
Watch the Hungarian GP live on Sky Sports F1. The race starts at 1pm on Sunday, with build-up underway at 11:30am. Or watch the race without a contract for £6.99 on NOW TV.
