Sauber’s Team Principal Monisha Kaltenborn says that Renault’s Jolyon Palmer should “stick to facts” after the British driver said Felipe Nasr should have received a grid penalty after he crashed with the Brazilian at the Italian Grand Prix.
Nasr and Palmer collided on lap two after exiting the first chicane at Monza, Palmer lost his front wing but continued. Nasr only received ten-second time penalty but Palmer feels that he should have been given a harsher penalty.
Speaking to Autosport, Kaltenborn responded to Palmer’s comments, “One should try to stick to the facts and not just see things you want to see. We didn’t even think we could get a penalty because it was so obvious. I cannot understand how they could penalise him because he was clearly in front. There’s no way he could have been looking at the back at what’s going on, and he didn’t push the guy out in any way whatsoever, but he gets penalised. I didn’t understand what the basis for that was, but fine, it’s happened.”
Kaltenborn did hope to get Nasr back out on the track and treat the race as a test session but the Brazilian retired on lap 6.
“We got the car in and checked it to see if it was driveable, whether it was safe to drive or not, so we managed to get him back out, but we could see it was not going to work,” he said.
“The main problem was the floor. We didn’t think there was anything wrong with the suspension at that time. But with the floor we could see it was moving a lot, and we thought we could somehow get it fixed, but it didn’t quite work. We were hoping he would be able to put more mileage on the car because the more you can get, the better.”
