Cars ran a handful of laps behind the safety car in the rain, never once went green, and the result still counted for half championship points. The backlash was loud enough that the FIA rewrote the rules within a year.
The Paddock Breakdown
Barry · Gary · KatGary Finch
The number that mattered here wasn't a lap time, it was a threshold. Under the regulations at the time, completing even a minimal number of laps behind the safety car was enough to trigger half points — the rule had never anticipated a race that ran laps without ever going green. The letter of the regulation was followed. The spirit of it clearly wasn't.
Within a year the FIA rewrote the points table entirely, introducing a tiered system tied to how many green-flag racing laps were actually completed. That's the real legacy of this one: not the half-points classification itself, but the fact that the rulebook had a gap wide enough to drive a two-lap non-race through, and got fixed because of it.
Kat Moreno
The conditions themselves weren't manufactured — Spa in heavy rain with standing water on a circuit that long is genuinely undriveable at racing speed, and the safety call not to go green was defensible. The issue was entirely downstream of that: a scoring system built around a binary of raced-or-not, with no tier for laps completed under caution only.
What the new tiered points system actually does technically is separate two questions the old rules had conflated: was it safe to run at all, and did meaningful competition happen. Spa 2021 forced the sport to answer both separately instead of assuming one implied the other.