Responded in another comment, my own issue is not whether the activity is allowed or not, but rather whether teams can predict what’s allowed in advance. No team is surprised by a penalty for speeding in the pit late, and the rule cited there is always consistent. Similarly, teams should know how much of a gap they can or can’t create under safety car conditions, and the rule enforcing that constraint should be consistently cited.

I wonder if the stewards basically combined his two borderline incidents and gave him one penalty for it. I thought he was likely to get a penalty for the unsafe release and was pretty surprised he didn’t, but on the flip side it seemed unlikely to get a penalty for driving too slow under a safety car.

As for the stewards problem, I really think they need to do a hybrid approach. Have 2-3 members of the stewards team that are on the FIA payroll and are part of the stewarding team at every event, but bring in an additional 2-3 different local stewards as well. Hopefully it would bring some consistency across how specific incidents are ruled, but by cycling new people through the group you avoid favoritism arguments.

I see why they did it: he gained an advantage by slowing down a lot that would not be there if he drove normally. I think it’s not the fact that he did it, it’s how much he slowed to give himself a gap to piastri…

As discussed in the post text, I don’t have an opinion on whether or not creating a gap should be allowed. The problem is:

• It generally has been allowed recently.
• The rule cited during the enforcement is pretty clearly the wrong rule, there is a rule in the safety car procedures about dangerous/unpredictable/too-slow driving. Again, citing this rule would be a confusing change, but would make more sense.

Regulating the safety car procedures is perfectly fine, but the regulation should be clear enough and consistently enough enforced that team can predict in advance whether an action is allowed or disallowed… it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Also the F1 administrator wants the stewards to be different all the time in order to have an external check and avoid conspiracy theories about stewards consistently favouring a team/driver.

Fair enough, the challenge here is that when the enforcement is quite inconsistent it raises questions about steward training and competency that are at least as serious as this concern, if not more.

Also, there is a professional race-direction team that refers incidents to the stewards for review. Bias could equally be a concern here, but they seem to have decided that training and consistency are the dominating factors here.

Exploiting the Safety Car rules to impede other drivers has been pretty consistently off limits…

This isn’t an area of regulations I’ve paid much attention to in my historical viewing, but the reporting disagrees with this assessment. Here’s a quote from Brundle’s weekend debrief:

Even rival team managers were telling me post-race that it’s been normal and accepted behaviour to build a small gap behind the Safety Car before a double team pit stop for a few years now, which indeed was Lando’s firm view.

To the extent that your assessment of this being consistently off-limits is true, I agree with your conclusion. The reporting disagrees with that premise though, and it’s not JUST McLaren quotes saying this is a change in enforcement.