Update regarding Monaco penalties

[John-Eric Saxén]

During the Monaco post-race check process, a routine log analysis revealed that the IP and submitted log details of Steffen Moller matched the ones of Morgan Morand from the same race weekend. Following this, the Silverline Racing management was urgently informed about the matter, in order to allow the team to present its view.

The response from the team and its drivers argued that Mr. Moller had been staying at Mr. Morand's house for the weekend and raced with his PC, due to real racing commitments in Belgium in the following weekend. However, the team failed to provide any concrete evidence to support this theory. Following this, the administration leniently decided to give Moller a chance to prove that his pace at Monaco matched the pace he had showed in the Saturday FSR race. This would have been arranged as a separate test race, where Mr. Moller would have to race from his Denmark IP.

Mr. Moller, however, failed to show up on the agreed test event in a time frame of three months. Therefore, in the lack of further evidence, the administration has no option but to conclude that Mr. Morand with all likelihood himself raced under the false name "Steffen Moller", which goes against FSR General Rules article 2.3. Further evidence supporting this is the fact that the fastest race lap time between the two drivers was only 1 tenth apart, which is unusual considering that Moller had not demonstrated any kind of podium pace in his two earlier World Series races.

As penalty, Moller is deemed as disqualified from the Monaco World Series results. Additionally, the 1.5 penalty points given to Moller in the Monaco WS race will also be added to Morand's license.

The Club board will yet discuss the penalty of Mr. Morand internally and as such it's not final yet. The World Series results are, however, final. Apologizes to the other participating drivers & teams for this huge delay.

 

[Ben Ross]

I just had this thread sent to me by Benjamin Chong and unfortunately have not yet had the chance to talk to Martin Christensen about this.

I do however want to put in a comment because in the top post it points out that Silverline Management was notified about this incident by FSR but that actually wasn't the case.

Martin Christensen is not part of Silverline Racing management. He is the manager of ATR. Silverline has a constructors partnership with ATR and part of that deal was that Steffen Moller could race under Silverline's WS seat and possibly be a reserve driver for the WC team if he had good pace. Silverline has limited if any, contact with the ATR drivers - Martin deals with those drivers himself and only really helps the SL drivers test and/or with setups. There have been a few cases where we have allowed ATR drivers (sometimes reluctantly) to drive in SL seats when they have been vacant as a favour to ATR since the seats would otherwise be unmanned by SL for those weekends.

Back when it was brought up originally, Martin informed me that he had spoken to the league officials about Monaco and explained it exactly as you describe below (That Steffen drove at Morgan's house), and said that if anyone contacted me to just point them to him because he had all the details and had spoken to Johannes about it. He also mentioned how Steffen was setup to run a test to prove his Monaco pace but that his real world race commitments would delay it a few weeks. Silverline was never contacted by the league so we assumed as he said, that Martin was taking care of it on his own. At no point was SL ever led to believe that anyone other than Steffen Moller was in that car.

At the beginning of the season, the opportunity to get the Silverline name involved in the WC division and also get some setup help for the rest of the drivers in the WS and WT divisions at Silverline was intriguing. It has appeared a few different times over the course of the year that being involved with ATR has started to tarnish what otherwise has been a good reputation for Silverline. We have had internal disputes as well but worked through them because we wanted to stay true to our end of our constructor's partnership. However, now that it is at a league level, as mentioned above, I feel the need to speak up on behalf of Silverline.

I want to make it very clear that Silverline Racing does not and would not tolerate any of the above behavior.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

After discussions we decided to close this thread and remove any irrelevant posts not related to this penalty. The thread will be updated when the penalty of Morand has been decided. To clarify, no penalties are directed towards the Silverline nor the ATR management this time, as there was no proof of their involvement.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

Referring to:

The Club board will yet discuss the penalty of Mr. Morand internally and as such it's not final yet.

since there was no further decision made by the president/wc director/board regarding this matter, as far as I can see, there will be no further penalties. Again, apologizes for the huge delay.