Bortoleto dropped to P15 for Turns 6-7 yellow-flag pass in Baku
Gabriel Bortoleto was handed a 10-second penalty for overtaking under yellow flags at the 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix last Saturday (26 September), dropping him from P13 to P15, the last classified finisher. The FIA admitted that a marshal's premature Safety Car board display contributed to 'clear confusion', but upheld the penalty on the grounds that a waved yellow flag is an instruction in its own right regardless of any accompanying signal. The result leaves Audi's Bortoleto still without a point this season.
What happened between Turns 6 and 7
The incident came on the lap-one Safety Car restart, in the zone between Turns 6 and 7. Moments earlier, Alpine's Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto had collided with McLaren's Lando Norris at Turn 1, triggering the Safety Car. According to the stewards, marshal posts in that zone were displaying physical 'SC' boards together with waved yellow flags. Bortoleto overtook Sergio Perez in that zone, and the move was referred to the stewards.
The signal error the FIA acknowledged
Bortoleto's side said he registered the yellow flags and SC boards but received no corresponding electronic indication on his steering wheel, and was told by his team over the radio that the Safety Car had not yet been deployed. The FIA accepted this, acknowledging that the marshals' early SC board display contributed to 'clear confusion' — effectively conceding that a genuine signal mismatch existed beyond driver error alone.
Why the penalty stood anyway
Despite accepting that context, the stewards kept the penalty in place. Their verdict stated that 'a waved Yellow Flag is an instruction in its own right and must be respected irrespective of any accompanying signal.' The marshal error contributed to the confusion, the stewards said, but it did not remove the obligation to respect the yellow flag itself. Bortoleto's 10-second penalty dropped him from P13 to P15, leaving Audi pointless again alongside Nico Hulkenberg's P11. Whether the signalling mismatch prompts a review of Safety Car board procedures has not been addressed.