This race the officials seemingly decided to be almost draconian when it came to track limits, especially considering the last race, right?
The Track Limit section of the event notes said the following:
In accordance with the provisions of Article 33.3, the white lines define the track edges. During Qualifying, Sprint and the Race, each time a driver fails to negotiate with the exit of turn 10, will result in that lap time and the immediately following lap time being invalidated by the Stewards.
They used the broad "the white line is the track limit everywhere" definition, but then only explicitly mention T10, i guess because the next lap was also supposed to be invalidated, so that addition was needed.
But looking at the deleted lap charts for the
race, the
qualifying and the
sprint it becomes evident that they only actively monitored T1, T9 and T10, even though drivers were just as likely to go wide on the exit of T3 (usually a time loss), the exit of T6 or entry of T7 (time gain) and the exit of T7 which is the same as cutting the apex at T8 (time gain).
The only corner that was also noted was Lando in T7 for going wide between T6 and T7 and hitting the gravel in quali but that was very obvious and shown live in the world feed - so impossible to miss.
So it is not at all surprising that they did not notice Perez cutting T8 during the Q2 session and that they ignored others going off track for example in T8 repeatedly.
So in the end they still managed to be sloppy and inconsistent despite the harsh and pedantic enforcement of track limits because they only did so for selected corners and ignored breaches of the provision in the race director's notes in all the others.
