Luscion wrote: ↑10 Jun 2024, 22:13
its literally in the fia document saying they admitted to it when they were summoned
The question is why people think it's relevant. If Verstappen has DNF'ed on lap 1, they could still argue that they'd want to avoid a safety car situation, for no other reason than letting everyone else race, even with two retired cars.
The document says nothing about whether or not they knew the car was shedding carbon fiber. As the video (GIF) posted by AR3-GP shows, Perez rejoined the track on his own accord almost instantly. If you want to make a case here, you need to argue that Red Bull knew the car was a safety hazard - which is a very hard point to make.
In fact, i find the penalty itself ridiculous. It's a driver has an accident, but the car is driveable and he gets going again quickly (like Perez did), the norm is pretty much always that the driver brings it back to the pits, often of their own accord. Otherwise you can find plenty of examples (some already provided by other posters) where drivers should have stopped on track and caused an SC. In fact, i can think of one they even missed if I'm not mistaken: Verstappens in Australia this year. If his brake had exploded before he made it to the pits in Australia, that should also have been a penalty by this standard.
Now keeping the car on track is a different matter. You can penalize teams or drivers if they don't bring a severely damaged car back to the pits, but stays out. But penalizing someone for bringing a damaged car back to the pits in a reasonable way (more on that in the next paragraph), when it's tenable to do so, rather than causing a safety car, it's just bad practice. Safety cars should be avoided if possible, and i don't believe it's reasonable for a team or driver to judge exactly what damage has occurred in such a short notice.
What should have been penalized, in my opinion, isn't Perez bringing it back to the pits, but the way he did it. Despite what the commentators said, he wasn't "limping" back. He was driving back at speed, which is what caused the carbon fiber to go all over the place. Had he truly been limping back at slower speeds, then all of this could have been avoided, and drivers would have just been shown white flags for "slow car ahead". Yuki in Zandvoort 2022 is af example of limping back to the pits slowly. Perez didn't do that. Sadly, he's an extremely impatient driver.