F1 | Bahrain GP Qualifying – FIA blunder costs Alex Albon, Williams protests. Williams furious over FIA’s late decision in F1 Bahrain GP Qualifying.

The FIA’s blunder during Bahrain GP qualifying proves costly for Williams, the team most penalized by the slowness with which decisions were made. The Federation admits fault, but there’s nothing more to be done for Alex Albon, who will start from P15, while Nico Hulkenberg was mistakenly allowed to proceed to the next session.

The disputed incident dates back to Q1 and mainly concerns Alex Albon and Nico Hulkenberg. The two completed their final attempts to make the cut, but only the German succeeded, while the Thai driver remained stuck in P15.

So far, nothing unusual—except for what happened much later. In fact, with Q3 already underway, the FIA announced the deletion of a time by the Stake driver dating back to Q1. This was due to track limits at Turn 11, initially overlooked by the Federation.

Nico Hulkenberg was then demoted to P16, just behind Alex Albon, who paid the price for the stewards’ oversight. Had the lap time been deleted immediately, the Williams driver would have advanced to Q2, possibly with a chance to get closer to Carlos Sainz, who for the first time this year qualified ahead of his teammate.

FIA mea culpa
In a statement, the governing body admitted that it did not consider the turn in question a high priority to monitor. “There are several critical areas related to track limits that are monitored live on an ongoing basis,” the statement reads.

“Track limit hotspots take precedence. Based on previous sessions, Turn 11 was not considered a critical area for track limits. In hindsight, it should have been higher on our list of priority turns.”

“Monitoring areas of the circuit like Turn 11 takes a bit more time compared to high-priority zones. Unfortunately, in this case, due to the timing of the review, it wasn’t possible to intervene before Q2 began. As soon as we became aware of the incident, we acted.

“We are working to increase resources and improve systems and processes. This time, we got it wrong.” The FIA admits its mistake, but nothing can be done for Alex Albon, who was, in fact, unfairly penalized.