Williams to implement pit release "fail-safe" after Hungary incident

Williams

Williams to implement pit release "fail-safe" after Hungary incident

Nicholas Latifi was released into the path of Carlos Sainz

Ian Parkes & Sam Hall

Thursday 30 July 2020 16:50

Williams is to implement a fail-safe procedure to prevent a repeat of the incident witnessed during the Hungarian Grand Prix when Nicholas Latifi collided with McLaren's Carlos Sainz in the pitlane.

It resulted in the Canadian suffering a puncture on his FW43 and being forced to limp around for a lap of the Hungaroring in order to make a change. Latifi finished last of the 19 classified drivers, five laps down on winner Lewis Hamilton.

Latifi has now confirmed Williams has learned from what transpired, and is set to make changes to compensate.

Article continues under video

"We're going to discuss it in a bit more detail, but I think going forward we will have a little bit of a fail-safe with one of the engineers on the radio just in case something like that needs to happen," said Latifi.

"We do have a procedure in place with different light systems, different light patterns to warn me of traffic if there is traffic, but there was a specific reason why that didn't go off and that has been addressed.

"We will implement another back-up plan with an engineer on the radio just in case."

As the tight confines of the cockpit of an F1 car make it almost impossible for a driver to manually check if the path is clear when exiting the pit box, the responsibility for allowing a driver to rejoin the race rests with the pit crew.

Explaining how simple it was for the error to have occurred in Hungary, Latifi added: "It was obviously a very busy pit lane, everyone diving in for the slicks in Hungary.

"So it was just a bit unfortunate. I saw the green light and when the green light goes, you go."

Before you go...

Perez returns "inconclusive" Covid test, currently isolating

Grosjean issues apology to Hamilton, but accused of being a racist on social media