SAO PAULO, Brazil — Late in final practice for the Brazilian Grand Prix on Saturday, a loose cockpit part came free in Sergio Perez’s Cadillac, and he threw it out onto the live Interlagos track. The FIA stewards later gave the Cadillac Formula 1 Team a formal warning for driving in an unsafe condition.
The part was tiny: a plastic cable organiser that normally attaches to the seat belt. It worked loose during the session. Perez was worried it would lodge somewhere else in the car and cause a safety problem, so he chose the quickest fix and threw it overboard.
That swapped one hazard for another. The piece stopped being a problem inside his cockpit and became debris on a track where other cars were still running.
“Something came off”
Perez was seen throwing something out of the cockpit in the closing stages of the hour-long final practice, Crash.net reported. His race engineer, Carlo Pasetti, got on the radio straight away.
“We saw you throwing something out of your car on the outlap. What was it?” Pasetti asked.
Perez wasn’t quite sure himself. “I don’t know it was, uh..something came off,” he replied. “I think the radio, where you put the radio cables, a little box.”
“Copy that. We will investigate,” Pasetti said. The stewards wanted a look too, and summoned both the driver and a team representative.
How the stewards judged the loose cockpit part
In their decision, Document 40, the stewards said they had reviewed in-car video and heard from the team representative. They placed the incident at 12:22 in Free Practice 3 and found a breach of Article B1.6.2a of the FIA F1 Regulations.
They gave the driver some credit. “While we appreciated the fact that it was a small, light piece of plastic that was unlikely to cause any damage to another car or injure another driver, throwing materials onto the track during a live session is not appropriate for obvious reasons,” the stewards wrote.
The warning, they added, was meant “to avoid similar situations from arising in the future.” The panel was made up of Nish Shetty, Loïc Bacquelaine, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Felipe Maluhy.
A warning, not a grid penalty
The warning went to Cadillac as the competitor, and it added no grid penalty. Perez was heading for the back of Sunday’s grid anyway, for an unrelated reason.
According to PlanetF1, the Mexican driver had moved on to a fifth internal combustion engine, fifth turbocharger and fourth MGU-K, for a total grid drop of 30 places. Any driver whose penalties add up to more than 15 places starts from the back automatically. Perez finished the session 20th fastest.
When loose hardware becomes track debris
On its own, a plastic clip is a small thing. The lesson is bigger. Anything that can work loose in a cockpit will eventually do so, and the driver then has two bad options: keep it rattling around near the controls or throw it onto the track.
Aviation has the same problem. FODNews has reported on stray tools turning up during Airbus A330neo tailplane inspections. In both cases, a small loose object becomes dangerous once it is somewhere it shouldn’t be. The fix starts before the session: secure every fitting so the driver never has to decide where to put it.
The stewards called this piece unlikely to hurt anyone. Their message was that the next piece might not be so harmless, and the track is not where it belongs.
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Sources
- FIA — “2026 São Paulo Grand Prix – Infringement – Car 11 – Driving in an unsafe condition” (Document 40) (Nov. 7, 2026)
- PlanetF1 — “FIA confirms double Brazilian GP punishment after investigation” (Nov. 7, 2026)
- Crash.net — “Sergio Perez faces investigation for unusual incident in Brazil GP practice” (Nov. 7, 2026)
