Image: (c) Paul McGrath/Spacesuit Media
Like London buses, there was another Article 14 Right of Review (RoR) at the Tokyo E-Prix.
However, something's gone wrong...
↩️ Background
Norman Nato and Robin Frijns collided with the latter suffering front wing damage. During the race, Nato received a 5-second penalty and 1 penalty point for causing a collision.
Andretti Global (Nato's team) submitted a valid RoR after the race. All fine so far.
📃 What evidence did they submit?
🎥 Nato's onboard camera footage.
🧑⚖️ What was the decision?
🎥 Onboard camera
✅ New – "...was not available to the Stewards at the time of the decision..."
✅ Relevant – the footage showed Nato didn’t change steering angle / racing line
✅ Significant – the footage showed Nato didn’t change steering angle / racing line
The Stewards subsequently overturned the penalty.
🚨So what's wrong?
The International Sporting Code (ISC) states that the evidence must be: "..unavailable to the parties (ie Andretti in this case) seeking the review at the time of the decision concerned...".
This adds clarity for competitors. If this was drafted as "unavailable to the Stewards", then competitors would never know if the Stewards had seen a thing when making their decision and so could chance an RoR of anything.
⚠️Therefore, the Stewards' written decision contains a clear mistake: the evidence needs to have been unavailable to Andretti NOT the Stewards.
It's possible this is an unfortunate clerical error and, like Campos in Australia, a malfunction means the onboard footage was unavailable to Andretti. However, if that’s not the case, then the Stewards have made an error when applying the ISC and the evidence should not have been accepted. This is not explained in the decision.
Separately, notwithstanding that the Stewards consider each decision separately (no precedent), we know from last week that host video footage and steering angle data are both NOT relevant and significant evidence regardless of whether they’re new. Here, the onboard footage was used to show the same thing (steering angle). This creates an unfortunate inconsistency making advising on this topic difficult.
➡️ Key learnings for Competitors
Unfortunately, this makes things unclear. The new advice is to try and submit a RoR even if the evidence submitted is not ISC compliant, and even if the Stewards have previously dismissed similar evidence, because you never know if it might succeed.
It would be helpful for the FIA to clarify this decision and RoR evidentiary standards to avoid that situation in future.