Formula 1 News

Date set for Toro Rosso appeal hearing 

A date has been set for Toro Rosso’s appeal against a stewards’ decision at Fuji Speedway last Sunday that cost the Faenza based team its first point of the 2007 season. STR’s Vitantonio Liuzzi actually crossed the line in eighth place ahead of Spyker racer Adrian Sutil in the rain-soaked Japanese grand prix, thereby opening the team’s points account to ninth place in the constructors’ title table.

Stewards, however, later imposed a 25-second penalty on the Italian’s finishing time for allegedly overtaking Sutil under yellow flags. “The team has lodged an Appeal against this decision,” Toro Rosso announced after the Fuji race. It emerged at Shanghai on Friday that the appeal will be held in Paris on 12 October (next Friday), mere days after Spyker begins arbitration proceedings in a Swiss court against the legality of Toro Rosso and Super Aguri’s cars. The fate of the last point in Fuji is likely to settle the fight for ninth and tenth places in the 2007 constructors’ championship; an apparently trivial detail that is however worth several million dollars in FOM income to the higher placed backmarker. Toro Rosso boss Franz Tost told Auto Motor und Sport magazine: “If the right thing happens, we will win the appeal.” The German publication claims that the team, co-owned by former Grand Prix winner Gerhard Berger, plans to argue that marshals failed to wave a green flag for Liuzzi and Sutil after the yellow-flag zone, despite the fact that the stricken Super Aguri was more than a kilometre behind them.

Toro Rosso will reportedly also argue in the October 12 appeal that no flags at all – green or yellow – were being waved at the point at which Liuzzi passed Sutil. Spyker marked Sutil’s maiden point with a media reception in the Shanghai paddock on Thursday, but Tost warned: “Perhaps they celebrated too early.”

source: GMM