Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Racing Bulls was fined €30,000, with €20,000 suspended for 12 months, after FIA stewards found Liam Lawson’s car breached Article C9.3 when its clutch disengagement system failed during FP1 at the Canadian Grand Prix and turned a recoverable stoppage into a red flag.
The issue began in the opening 10 minutes of the sole practice session at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, when a ruptured joint caused a hydraulic leak on Lawson’s VCARB 03 and left the car stranded. Stewards found that when a marshal activated the Clutch Disengagement System, the clutch did not release, so the car could not be moved under what had initially been a Virtual Safety Car situation.
That is the core of the breach. Article C9.3 requires every Formula 1 car to have a device capable of disengaging the clutch for at least 15 minutes when a car is stopped with the engine off, and the system must remain in working order even if the main hydraulic, pneumatic or electrical systems have failed.
In the stewards’ written decision, after hearing from Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls representatives, the FIA Technical Delegate and the FIA Electronics Engineer, the FIA said: “This is a serious matter. It resulted in the session being red-flagged. Had the system worked as intended by the regulations, the incident could have been dealt with swiftly via deployment of the Virtual Safety Car.”
The ruling also revived an earlier concern inside the FIA about Racing Bulls’ CDS layout. The team’s engineer explained that the system on Lawson’s car performed two roles: releasing the clutch when the car is stopped and the engine is not running, and a second function related to the anti-stall system. The stewards noted the FIA Technical Delegate’s concern over that dual-purpose design and said the team had already been warned in 2025 about the CDS system design on its cars.
Lawson also raised issues about the recovery itself. The stewards recorded that, contrary to his instructions and common practice, marshals first tried to push the car while it was stationary, and that the marshal attempting to activate the CDS was trying to press a button on the on-board camera rather than the CDS button. The stewards said this showed that “further training in this area is required,” adding that the FIA’s written recovery guidance “probably needs supplementing with some form of practical training by the organisers.”
That left the case with consequences beyond the fine itself: Racing Bulls was punished for a system that failed when the regulations required it to work, and the FIA also signaled it now sees a need to improve trackside recovery training after the Lawson stoppage exposed both problems at once.