The Racing Point team have been handed a 400,000 euro fine and docked 15pts from the World Constructors Championship following a hearing between Formula 1 stewards, the FIA and some team principals.

As ever with this sort of thing in Formula 1, it’s not a straight forward, easy to explain thing. The short version is:

Teams can buy parts and designs from other teams, except listed parts. For 2020, this includes brake ducts. Racing Point do buy parts from Mercedes, and in 2019, brake ducts were fine, but for 2020 the brake ducts were added to the ‘listed parts’ that cannot be bought in. It’s a slightly grey area, because the front brake ducts were on the 2019 car and naturally became part of the 2020 design. The rear brake ducts, however were changed and for 2020, Racing Point used Mercedes’ designs.

For more detail on the technicalities and how this is all worked out, see the brilliant video from ChainBear below, he explains how the car isn’t illegal and how the team had a fairly lenient penalty.

The end result is that the Racing Point team have had 15pts (7.5pts per car) deducted.

This result has not gone down well and now, multiple teams are appealing the decision. Typical Formula 1 – take a messy situation, make it messier and then everyone gets involved and heck knows where this is going.

For Fantasy Grand Prix, we’ve decided to ignore this situation for now – the race results still stand and the points awarded in Fantasy GP are based around starting and finishing positions. If the cars had been excluded from results, action would be taken, but in this scenario, points remain the same.

Note that with the ongoing meetings, appeals and such like, we’ll continue to review the outcome of any penalties, but as things are at the moment, results and therefore points remain as they stand now.