Ollie Bearman handed hefty grid penalty for red flag offence in Monaco GP practice

Ollie Bearman has been hit with a 10-place grid penalty for Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix.

Bearman was found guilty of overtaking Carlos Sainz under red flag conditions.

The incident occurred after Isack Hadjar clattered the barriers, resulting in a red flag.

The initial investigation stemmed from Bearman overtaking a slow-moving Williams in the final part of the lap after the red flag had been put out.

With overtaking under red flags prohibited, Bearman has been handed a hefty 10-place grid penalty.

The Monaco Grand Prix is notoriously difficult to overtake, making Bearman’s challenge of a strong race on Sunday incredibly challenging.

Based on practice, Bearman will likely start the race from the back of the grid.

The Ferrari junior was only 15th-fastest in FP2.

Why was Ollie Bearman penalised?

While the stewards acknowledged that Bearman was informed “rather late” by his race engineer, a light panel directly in front of him showed the session was red-flagged.

F1’s rules require drivers to “immediately” reduce their speed and return back to the pit lane.

Drivers are strictly “forbidden” from overtaking because of potentially other vehicles being on track.

The stewards noted: “The driver claimed that he saw the red flags but decided not to slow down abruptly because he felt that slowing down abruptly would have been more dangerous and that what he did was a safer way of handling the situation.

“We disagreed with his decision to not take steps to slow down sufficiently to avoid overtaking another car and instead proceeding slowly back to the pits, as required.

“The whole purpose of requiring drivers to slow down immediately is for safety – they will not know what is in front of them or the reason for the red flag being shown. This is particularly so in a track like Monaco.

“In the circumstances, there is no mitigating factor for the fact that he overtook a car under red flag and we therefore imposed a penalty of a 10 grid place drop for the Race and 2 penalty points.”