Williams Racing has been handed a fine for the sum of €10,000 after breaching tyre rules during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix. After the first 40 minutes of the first practice session of a grand prix weekend, teams are meant to hand back one set of tyres from their allocation.
This process can be disrupted and delayed in the event of a session being red flagged, and this happened this morning courtesy of Felipe Massa who crashed on the exit of Les Combes in the early stages of practice one. After this accident, it was found that Williams had done some running on one of its nominated sets of tyres on Lance Stroll's car, one hour after Massa's accident.
After examining the breach, the FIA concluded that a fine was necessary when taking into account a number of other offences from Williams, despite the team apologising for the incident by admitting that it had made a mistake.
A statement issued by the FIA read: "Having considered the facts the Stewards accept that the infringement was inadvertent. The Stewards have taken due note of repeated offences concerning tyres by the team and a similar infringement for which a suspended fine was imposed."
Williams committed a similar offence at the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix, where Felipe Massa used tyres in a practice session that should have been returned. This resulted in the Grove-based team being handed a suspended €10,000 fine.
Chris Soulsby
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