Oscar Piastri committing a “clear breach” of the FIA’s sporting regulations resulted in him receiving his race-costing penalty in Formula 1’s British Grand Prix.

Piastri was handed a 10-second time penalty that, once served at his final pitstop, meant he lost the race lead (and victory) to his McLaren team-mate Lando Norris.

Piastri was evidently unhappy with the penalty after the race, saying “apparently you can’t brake behind the safety car anymore” in parc ferme.

His McLaren team was not impressed during the race either, with McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown dismissing Sky Sports F1’s claim that it was a clear-cut penalty.

“It looked more dramatic on TV than we saw on the telemetry,” Brown said.

So why was Piastri penalised?

What the stewards said

The stewards said Piastri “suddenly braked hard [59.2psi of brake pressure] and reduced speed in the middle of the straight between Turn 14 and Turn 15, from 218km/h to 52km/h” when the safety car was called in and its lights went out, requiring Verstappen “to take evasive action to avoid the collision”.

In the podium cooldown room after the race, Piastri said this sudden braking was “coincidental” with the timing of the safety car lights going out.

Nevertheless, the stewards deemed this to have met the threshold of “erratic braking”.

When the FIA rejected Red Bull’s Canadian GP protest that suggested George Russell had committed a similar breach when leading behind the safety car, the stewards found Russell had applied 30 psi of brake pressure, almost half of Piastri’s brake pressure at Silverstone.

Article 55.15 of the FIA sporting regulations requires the safety car leader to “proceed at a pace which involves no erratic braking nor any other manoeuvre, which is likely to endanger other drivers from the point at which the lights on the safety car are turned off”.

The stewards found that what Piastri “did was clearly a breach of that article”, so he was penalised 10 seconds as per the recently-publicly published penalty guidelines.