Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Raikkonen hit with gearbox penalty

Kimi Raikkonen has been handed a five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix.

The Finn stopped on track during Q2 on Saturday, leaving him 14th on the provisional grid having been unable to set a time during the session. However, Ferrari has needed to change Raikkonen's gearbox, which carries a five-place penalty.

There are a number of grid penalties at Spa-Francorchamps, which are all applied in order in their entirety as if the grid had infinite space. As a result of a 55-place grid penalty, Fernando Alonso drops to 73rd place and Jenson Button drops to 67th thanks to a penalty of 50 places.

With Max Verstappen receiving a penalty of ten places for using a sixth power unit element, the Toro Rosso driver drops to 25th place. Gaps are left while penalties are applied, so Roberto Merhi is provisionally 20th with Raikkonen's five-place penalty dropping him to 19th behind Will Stevens, and a similar penalty for Romain Grosjean demoting the Frenchman from fourth to ninth.

With the cars then all closed up to fill the vacant slots, Stevens climbs to 15th place, Raikkonen to 16th and Merhi 17th ahead of Verstappen, Button and Alonso.

Click here for a gallery of the biggest crashes at Spa-Francorchamps

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.