MELBOURNE, Australia -- Race director Charlie Whiting has confirmed that the FIA's ruling on moving under braking while defending position -- colloquially known as "the Verstappen rule" -- is no longer in the regulations.
Over the winter the FIA simplified the section of the sporting regulations that relates to wheel-to-wheel racing between drivers with a catch-all article that says no penalty will be issued unless a driver is "wholly or predominantly to blame for an incident".
At least two driver briefings last year were almost solely dedicated to the subject of moving under braking, specifically the actions of Max Verstappen at previous races. The Dutch teenager's tendency to block another driver at the last minute saw the FIA, in consultation with the drivers, issue a ruling in the U.S. Grand Prix race notes to outlaw such driving.
However, the new, simplified regulations are aimed at giving the stewards greater flexibility to decide what incidents to investigate and more freedom to apply common sense. Whiting admits some incidents last year, such as Sebastian Vettel's clash with Daniel Ricciardo in Mexico, would have resulted in some different rulings under the new way of stewarding.
"I think there would be a small change in some of the incidents that we've seen last year -- they'd be handled quite differently simply because the so-called "Verstappen rule" is gone to the effect that before we said any move under braking will be investigated," he explained. "Now, we have a simple rule that says effectively that if a driver moves erratically or goes unnecessarily slow or behaves in a manner that could endanger another driver, then he will be investigated. So there's a very broad rule now.
"What we did after Austin last year, in response to some comments from drivers, is use the existing rules to put notes on how we're going to interpret the existing rules. And the interpretation simply was that drivers shouldn't move under braking. That's what gave rights to the incident in Mexico, that's what gave rights to the penalty in Mexico. But that will be dealt with slightly differently.
"The stewards will be invited to simply focus on every incident and judging on its own merits. So each incident will be dealt with only on the basis of whether or not it was a dangerous manoeuver, not necessarily because he moved under braking.
"What we were requested to do, which we think is a more general way of approaching things, is to give the stewards one rule to work with. It's an all-encompassing rule. You can do more or less anything with that. That was the request from the teams, they wanted less investigations and only in cases where it was clearly dangerous would they take action.
"We had a meeting yesterday with all the stewards and we reviewed all the controversial incidents from last year to see how they would be dealt with this year under the so-called new rules or the new approach. It was quite interesting."
Whiting said the stewards will also have instant access to footage of past incidents in order to make the process of deciding on a penalty quicker and more consistent from race to race.
"We have told all stewards that we want to try and speed things up a little bit. We've taken some measures to make sure that post-race checks are done more quickly in order to try and get the result out much faster than it has been in the past, so we'll see if that works. But it's a little difficult.
"What we've done to try and help the stewards is to introduce what we call a video archiving system which allows them to instantly refer to other incidents of a similar nature. Without having to trawl through and find what happened with so-and-so, they'll be able to pull up any similar incidents. They'll be sorted by type of incident for example, causing a collision, click click, six of those incidents, see what the decisions were because they will be tagged to the incident.
"That should be able to give the stewards not only more chance of being consistent but also to do things faster. So I'm optimistic that we can get things done quickly. We do understand that it must be very tedious hanging around for hours for stewards to decide things."
When Verstappen was asked about the change in regulations, he simply said: "It doesn't change much for me I think it's always better to let us race in general, that's what racing is for."