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Graeme Lowdon says Monaco points will 'make an enormous difference' to Marussia

Backmarker team hoping to race Sauber on a regular basis

Jules Bianchi celebrates with Graeme Lowdon
Image: Jules Bianchi celebrates with Graeme Lowdon

Graeme Lowdon says the prize money Marussia could well receive after scoring their first F1 points would "make an enormous difference" - but added that the team are well aware they haven't secured ninth or even tenth spot yet.

Marussia's points joy looked set to turn to heartbreak in the closing stages in Monaco when Bianchi was issued with a second five-second stop/go penalty. The Frenchman had originally been penalised for starting out of position on the grid, but as he served the penalty whilst the Safety Car was deployed, he was given the time sanction for a second time. Lowdon admits the team are still unclear on what the exact rule is and hope to have it clarified ahead of the Canadian GP. "We did effectively serve it twice and we will talk to the FIA about it because I think we did stumble across an area where we could interpret the rules in a few different ways," he said. "Basically, the way we saw it was that there was an incident at the start with the location of Jules, Max [Chilton] and [Esteban] Gutierrez on the grid so there was a five-second stop/go penalty given. "That is a new penalty for this year and the idea is that that penalty takes place before the guys start work on a pit-stop and if you don't take that pit-stop five seconds gets added to your time at the end of the race. "But if you do take a pit-stop, the rules say that if you don't actually apply that penalty then you can be excluded. We had our pit-stop window, Max had stopped the lap before and we had to stop Jules on that lap, but the Safety Car came out through an incident that we weren't connected to at all. "So our view was, 'Do we serve the penalty even though there is a Safety Car and then risk losing time in the pits or do we not serve it and potentially risk exclusion?' It wasn't straightforward and we chose to serve the penalty - we could have raced [Kamui] Kobayashi in the pit-stops if we hadn't served the penalty so it wasn't as if it was done with no effect on us. "Jules then went back out and we became under investigation again for serving it under the Safety Car and another five-second stop/go was given and as we didn't stop again effectively we served it twice. It is an area where some of the wording can be read in a few different ways so we will clarify it with Charlie [Whiting] ahead of the next race."

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