Krack: Stroll penalty "very harsh" after F1 China "chain reaction"

Stroll hit Ricciardo under the safety car as the field bunched up in the penultimate corner for a lap 27 restart.A furious Ricciardo was forced to retire his damaged RB car, while McLaren’s Oscar Piastri also sustained rear-end damage when his compatriot’s car was pushed into him.The stewards wholly blamed Stroll for not taking more care to avoid the contact and handed him a 10-second penalty and two penalty points, which Stroll felt was “a joke”.His team boss Krack backed the Canadian and questioned why such a snap verdict was issued soon after the incident.”A very, very quick verdict without really understanding… I thought it was very, very fast and very harsh, very quick decision,” Krack said when Autosport quizzed him about the punishment.”I think it was a chain reaction at the end of the day. You saw Fernando [Alonso] locking and another car behind and I think everybody was a little bit caught out there.”I would have liked that this would have been looked at in a little bit more detailed way. We tried to discuss it, but the verdict was very quickly that Lance was to blame. And he got a 10-second penalty, additional to the front wing damage.”

Mike Krack, Team Principal, Aston Martin F1 Team

Mike Krack, Team Principal, Aston Martin F1 Team

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Ricciardo was particularly frustrated with Stroll ducking responsibility for the clash despite pointing out the Aston driver was looking at the apex of Turn 14 rather than what was happening ahead of him.”These situations are created in the front,” Krack responded. “Now, you can always say, you need to be more careful.”But, on the other hand, if you’re too careful, and you have the restart and you lose more than one car length – everybody says ‘are you asleep?'”Things like that happen at different tracks. You remember the incident we had in Mugello [at the 2020 Tuscan GP], where there were a lot of cars involved.”This is always the erratic movement that happens on a safety car restart. And we have some of these every year and will continue to.”