F1 drops penalty for pitting while safety car deploys

LONDON — Formula One drivers will no longer be penalized for entering pit lane during the early stages of a safety car going onto the track.

The 2007 rule change has been reversed because drivers won’t be able to pit “any quicker than your dashboard display allows you to,” Charlie Whiting, race director for the governing body, said Tuesday in a briefing.

“We intend to implement a minimum time back to the pits,” Whiting wrote. “When we deploy the safety car, the message will go to all the cars, which will then have a ‘safety car’ mode on their ECUs (electronic control units).

“As soon as that message gets to the car, it’ll know where it is on the circuit, and it’ll calculate a minimum time for the driver to get back to the pits. The driver will have to respect this.”