The FIA have released new radio limit guidelines ahead of this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix which force a driver to enter the pits if they require assistance to remedy a technical problem with their car.
The change comes after Mercedes gave Nico Rosberg information during the British GP which infringed the rules on what can and can't be communicated over team radio.
That resulted in a ten-second penalty, dropping the German from second to third and reducing his championship advantage to just a single point.
In a technical directive issued to the teams this week, the FIA has amended a couple of the permitted radio messages, with number two now stating that a driver must enter the pits to be informed of how to rectify the problem.
"Indication of a problem with the car. Any message of this sort must include an irreversible instruction to enter the pits to rectify the problem or to retire the car," it now reads, whereas previously the team could communicate this information freely as long as the problem was "potentially terminal".
Therefore Rosberg would have been forced to enter the pits to receive information on how to fix his gearbox, though he wouldn't have been required to enter his garage, as the wording has been amended. Radio communication is now restricted to the track only, whereas before it included the pitlane but not the garage.
Another amendement is to item three, with a small tweak to the wording. Previously it read "information concerning damage to the car [is permitted]", but now states: "Information concerning damage to the bodywork of the car."
Item four has also been amended to ensure changes are being made for reliability rather than performance and now reads: "Instructions to select driver defaults, this must be for the sole purpose of mitigating loss of function of a sensor, actuator or controller whose degradation or failure was not detected and handled by the onboard software.
"It will be the responsibility of any team giving any such instruction to satisfy the FIA technical delegate that this was the case and that any new setting chosen in this way did not enhance the performance of the car beyond that prior to the loss of function (see Article 8.2.4 of the Technical Regulations)."
Discussion about this post