Racing Driver Fined €5000 After She Shared Footage Of Near Miss With Course Car

During a practice session for the ADAC Formula 4 Championship at the Oschersleben circuit in Germany, a car got stranded in the gravel and the session was red-flagged so it could be safely removed.

However, a course vehicle was a little bit too keen to get over to the stranded car and crossed the track without looking…right as Mucke Motorsport driver Sophia Floersch was coming around the corner.

Yowsers, that was close! Even though Floersch had slowed down because of the red flag the closing speed is immense and she only just managed to swerve out of the way in time. If she’d have hit it…well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Understandably Floersch was pretty shaken up by the incident, and speaking to German publication Bild she said: “I was in shock, I cried, could hardly calm down. Luckily, my family was with me.”

Afterwards she shared the video of what happened on social media. After all, this sort of thing really shouldn’t be happening in 2017.

However, instead of questioning why the vehicle crossed the track in the first place the organisers decided it was more important to slap the 16-year-old with a €5000 fine for sharing the video online without permission, which is a breach of the championship rules. The ruling itself says:

It is forbidden to publish any footage taken during an event, unless specifically approved by the ADAC. The stewards shall punish any infringement with fines of at least €20,000.

Though it was later confirmed by the ADAC that it would ‘only’ be €5000 initially, it could be increased to the full €20,000 at a later date.

That’s still a massive amount of money for a young driver in a junior series however, and despite the rules you have to wonder if she’d have been punished if it wasn’t a video which shows the series in such a bad light.

Either way the breach of media regulations shouldn’t have been main focus of the organisers here. The priority should have been ensuring that something as potentially dangerous as a course car crossing a circuit doesn’t happen again.