Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo has welcomed the clarification from the FIA that on-track incidents will only be punished if they're considered "dangerous" by the race stewards, following a relaxtion of the "Verstappen rule" which was introduced last season.
Following a number of incidents – mostly involving Max Verstappen, hence the name – where drivers were moving under braking, the FIA introduced a new rule which meant any such incident would be investigated and likely punished.
Although only Sebastien Vettel fell foul of the rule, it was thought it would discourage drivers from "wheel-to-wheel" racing and lessen the on-track excitement, therefore it has been dropped for the 2017 season with race director Charlie Whiting confirm only incidents deemed "dangerous" would be punished at the discretion of the stewards.
"The stewards will be invited to simply focus on every incident and judge it on its own merits," Whiting said on Thursday. "So each incident will be dealt with only on the basis of whether or not it was a dangerous manoeuver, not necessarily because he moved under braking.
"What we were requested to do, which we think is a more general way of approaching things, is to give the stewards one rule to work with. It's an all-encompassing rule. You can do more or less anything with that. That was the request from the teams, they wanted less investigations and only in cases where it was clearly dangerous would they take action.
"We had a meeting yesterday with all the stewards and we reviewed all the controversial incidents from last year to see how they would be dealt with this year under the so-called new rules or the new approach. It was quite interesting."
Ricciardo hopes it will mean less investigations, allowing drivers to get on with racing: "The good part of it is it means less decisions to be made on-track, in a way," he said.
"If they leave it up to us I guess the positive is that we sort it out on track. Hopefully we can get redemption if we feel like something has not gone our way. I like being able to race, that’s the positive from it."
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