How to prevent deliberate yellow flags

Whatever your position on Nico Rosberg's suspicious trip up the Mirabeau escape road in the final minute of qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix, you will agree that it was unfortunate for those behind him - and that wasn't only Lewis Hamilton - who lost out on what would have been their key qualifying laps.

A badly-timed yellow flag is an inherent risk in motorsport, particularly in qualifying. At a tight track like Monaco, drivers will always face the danger that when their tyres are at their best and they embark on what should be the ultimate lap, someone else will make an error and ruin everything.

This situation is unavoidable. No matter what action is taken, it's impossible to give a driver back a lap that they had to abandon. There is no way to cancel out the consequences.

But there are measures to prevent a situation like this happening again in terms of allegations that a yellow flag had been caused deliberately. You could take the 'c'est la guerre' approach and just accept that sometimes this happens, and therefore the temptation for a driver to attempt something like this remains. Or, you can introduce measures to prevent it even crossing someone's mind.

There has been a suggestion that simply adding extra time to a session, which realistically would have to be equal or slightly greater than a laptime to allow everyone an extra attempt, could solve it.

Perhaps, but while at Monaco the tyres were durable enough for more than one quick lap, in many circumstances that will not be the case. But this is approaching things from the wrong angle because there is still a very good chance that whoever causes the yellow flag will gain.

F1 should look stateside on how to deal with yellow flag situations

Instead, it would be logical to take a leaf out of the book of American racing. In IndyCar, if you cause a full course caution or a red flag during qualifying, you lose your two best laptimes.

While an incident like Rosberg's, which left him up an escape road, would probably lead only to a static local yellow flag in IndyCar, the full course caution is broadly analogous to a waved yellow in F1. So as a foundation of a rule to stop this happening, the example of stripping a driver of laptimes makes some sense. But there are problems.

Were Rosberg to have been stripped of his best time in Q3, his pole lap of 1m15.989s, that would leave him only with the lap immediately before that one, a slow 1m20.969s to qualify on. This would relegate him to 10th.

It's a draconian punishment, but considering the yellow flag compromised the qualifying results of several drivers, it's not unreasonable. But perhaps a variation on this theme would be more equitable.

Drivers are regularly given grid penalties for impeding others in qualifying. The vast majority of these occasions are accidental but still the offender is punished. Sometimes, even when there is no real consequence for the wronged party.

So with the structure of F1 qualifying making stripping a driver of a laptime or two risky, it would perhaps make more sense to mandate a grid penalty. If you cause a waved yellow flag, you get relegated.

In the case of the Monaco GP, the existence even of a one-place grid penalty would have removed any question marks over whether or not Rosberg's mistake was an honest one.

Schumacher infamously disrupted Monaco qualifying in 2006 © XPB

And in 2006, Michael Schumacher would never even have contemplated deliberately stopping at Rascasse to stop Fernando Alonso beating him to pole position. There would be nothing to gain. To be safe, perhaps a three-place grid penalty for whoever causes a yellow or red flag would be most appropriate.

As with all such proposals, a proper analysis would need to be conducted on instances of yellow flags in qualifying to understand fully what the consequences are. But as a basic approach, an automatic grid penalty would eradicate all suspicions.

You could argue that this is too heavy-handed a way to tackle a situation that arises very rarely. Perhaps, but imagine if we get to the final race in Abu Dhabi and something similar happens?

What if one of the two Mercedes drivers has pole position provisionally, then spins or stops on track and prevents the other attacking late in Q3? Then, let's imagine the 'offender' leads the race from start to finish, just keeping the chaser behind and taking the world championship. It would taint a title decider and potentially make F1 look foolish.

Granted, a grid penalty could give an advantage the other way, but it's preferable to the situation that arose in Monaco. After all, even if circumstances arose whereby stewards were convinced that this hypothetical off in Abu Dhabi were deliberate, they would need not only to believe it, but be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt in court should it get that far.

Both the temptation to cause a yellow or red flag deliberately, and the possibility that future races will be overshadowed by suspicions, legitimate or not, should be eliminated.

The grid penalty solution is not perfect and it will punish drivers for making honest mistakes at a time when they should be laying it on the line and going for broke.

But by punishing the offender, whether they are unwitting or not, the Monaco controversy would never have happened.