The FIA has admitted it "overreacted" to an incident at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix which hampered Haas on several occasions across the rest of the 2022 season.
The scarcely-used black and orange flag, also known as the 'meatball', became a more regular sight than usual this year. It is designed to be flown whenever a driver is running with damage that the stewards feels is "likely to endanger himself or others" on the track.
When shown that flag, a driver is obliged to pit so their mechanics can attempt to fix it. They can only rejoin the race once whatever the problem was is no longer posing a significant risk, in the eyes of the stewards.
It happened in Azerbaijan, when Yuki Tsunoda picked up damage to his rear wing. The problem meant only half of the wing opened when he engaged his DRS system, which race officials deemed to be unsafe enough to show the Japanese the meatball flag and force him to pit.
That led to those infamous scenes of the AlphaTauri mechanics in the pit lane using tape as a basic quick fix. The footage led to plenty of mocking on social media, and the FIA has now admitted that it was the wrong decision to allow Tsunoda to continue that day.
"We had a situation in Baku where objectively a car was let to run with damage that really a car should not be running with," said single seater technical director Nikolas Tombazis. "One of [the] AlphaTauris with rear wing damage that was taped up or something like that, that was ridiculous. Clearly there, we got it wrong."
It led to the FIA using the flag more often to avoid a similar circumstance, but the unfortunate side-effect was that some drivers were shown it in situations where they perhaps shouldn't. Haas, and particularly Kevin Magnussen, bore the brunt of that as he was shown it no fewer than three times this year – harming his race on each occasion.
Magnussen and team principal Guenther Steiner showed their anger when Fernando Alonso was allowed to complete the USGP with damage. The Dane described the situation as "bulls**t", while Steiner said he was "not really happy" and suggested other teams weren't being hampered in the same way as Haas.
Tombazis admitted the FIA became over-zealous in its application, adding: "I think then that created a bit of an overreaction where we started deeming cars unsafe even when they were a bit on the limit, let's say. So we went a bit too far in one direction."
