Penalties may be imposed on drivers for numerous offenses, including starting prematurely, speeding in the pitlane, causing an accident, blocking unfairly, or ignoring flags of any color. There are four types of penalty which a driver may incur for violation of on-track rules:
The drive-through penalty requires the driver to enter the pitlane, drive through it while obeying its speed limit, and exit without stopping. Drive-through penalties are normally imposed for minor offences, for example crossing the white line at the end of the pit lane before passing over the end of the line, kerb-hopping at chicanes, ignoring yellow flags, or cutting corners. As a drive through penalty does not require the driver to stop at their pit, it is less costly to a driver's race times than a stop-go penalty.
The ten-second (or "stop-go") penalty requires the driver to enter the pitlane, stop at his pit for ten seconds, and exit again. As the stop is designed to punish the driver for an offence, team mechanics are forbidden to work on the offending car at any time while the driver is serving the penalty. Stop-go penalties are generally imposed for more serious offences, such as jump starts, pit lane speeding, ignoring blue flags or unfair blocking. The ten second halt makes a stop-go penalty much more costly to a driver's race times than a drive-through penalty.
A more extreme penalty may be imposed for more severe infractions: adding ten places to the driver's grid position at the next grand prix, e.g. if he qualified in pole position he would start the race eleventh from the front.
The most severe penalty in common use is a black flag, which may be imposed for ignoring penalties or for technical irregularities of any sort; it signifies that the driver has been disqualified from the race and his results for that race will not count toward the championship.
If the black flag is not considered sufficient for the offense that the driver has committed, they may be banned for a number of races after the event.
The most extreme punishment of all (used for seriously endangering the life of another driver) is to be excluded from the drivers world championship that year. Such cases may, of course, also be taken to court.
For the drive-through and stop-go penalties, a driver has two laps from the time his team hears of the penalty to enter the pits; if he does not pit within two laps, he will be black-flagged. The exception to this rule is if the Safety Car is deployed before a driver serves his penalty, in which case he is not allowed to serve his penalty until after the Safety Car comes back in. If he incurs a penalty within the last five laps of the race, he need not pit at all; instead, twenty-five seconds will be added to his total race time in case of a drive-through penalty, and thirty seconds in case of stop-go penalty.
