Magnussen handed post-race time penalty

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Kevin Magnussen has been handed a ten-second post race penalty following the end of the Spanish Grand Prix, which means he is now classified as finishing in 15th place.

The stewards investigated an incident that occurred on the final lap of the race between Magnussen and his Renault team mate Jolyon Palmer.

Magnussen had opted for a three-stop race strategy putting him on faster, fresher soft compound tyres for the final laps of the race. By contrast his team mate was working a two-stop strategy and trying to make a set of hard compound tyres last more than half the race distance all the way to the finish.

That meant the two cars were running at markedly different speeds in the final minutes of the race, and Magnussen caught Palmer at turn 13 and the pair made contact. After reviewing the incident, the race stewards put the blame for the clash on Magnussen.

"Car 20 was on a new set of soft tyres, and Car 30 was on an older set of hard tyres leading the driver of Car 20 to have significantly better grip and speed," said the official notice of the stewards' decision.

"However, the Stewards determined that Car 20 could not have reasonably expected to make the corner of Turn 13 without colliding with Car 30, which was subsequently forced off the track. The Stewards imposed the penalty referred to, which was converted to a time penalty after the race as the cars were on the last lap."

The stewards decided on a ten-second penalty which means that the Dane drops from 14th place to 15th, with Sauber's Felipe Nasr picking up an extra place as a result. Magnussen also gets two points on his superlicence.

"It wasn't a good day for me and I'll be working closely with the team to understand why we weren't able to deliver," said Magnussen. "We had decent pace on the soft tyre but on the hard and the medium - especially the medium - we were weak.

Magnussen will return to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya later this week to take part in the official two-day FIA test.

"I'm definitely looking forward to the test and getting some new bits on the car as today certainly wasn't representative of what we're capable of achieving," he said.

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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.