The case around the penalty given to Carlos Sainz during the F1 Dutch GP will stay a topic going into the Italian GP race weekend.
Williams submit right of review
Sainz was upset with a 10-second time penalty he received for an incident with Liam Lawson during the Dutch GP. Both drivers came together at Turn 1 and blamed the other to be at fault. The stewards decided to penalise the Williams driver. The team’s team boss James Vowles believes it was a racing incident.
Just before Friday action started, Williams confirmed it has submitted a right of review into the case. The team seeks to understand how the racing standard needs to be in the future.
Sainz already teased in the press conference ahead of the Italian GP that this submission would come soon: “We are trying to see if we can come up with enough evidence to change the outcome of the penalty, because I still firmly believe it was a very poor penalty I received and a bad judgment, which can happen as long as you have the capacity to revisit it.
“If there’s been a misunderstanding or a lack of evidence or analysis, then there is still time to reanalyse it, reopen it, and change it.”
Sainz had a chance to speak with the stewards
The Spaniard was asked if he was able to speak to the stewards after the race in Zandvoort. He confirmed he did: “I did get the chance to go and speak to them after the race. There was a misunderstanding while I was in the TV pen where I thought I would not be able to go. But in the end, I had the opportunity to go and sit with them for 15 minutes to analyse the incident.”
When analysing the incident together with the stewards, Sainz was presented with evidence that explain why his penalty was rightly handed. However, the 31-year-old believes that “it was clear to me that they probably realised the decision taken wasn’t the best one.”
He adds, that the stewards might have had a “difficult Sunday” with a “busy afternoon”. It might have been “overwhelming” due to the “amount of stuff that happened” during the race. Nevertheless, he stands firm on his standpoint regarding the penalty: “Now in a cooler-headed state, I still believe the penalty was not acceptable, and I made it very clear.”
Support for the idea of fixed stewards
Sainz admitted that it is “very tough” to control emotions after a race, especially when faced with rulings that are “very difficult to understand.”
He repeated the call for fixed stewards: “The regulations are already incredibly complex, it would be very useful to always have the same people judging and applying them, because then you know what you’re dealing with,” he said and added: “My belief is that’s the way forward.”
“If you just apply the rule in the rulebook, you could understand why they would want to penalise me. The moment you analyse the onboard footage and go into detail, you can clearly see why I should have never got a penalty,” he explained.
By contrast, he felt the Hamilton case “took too long.” Hamilton failed to slow under double yellow flags during the installation laps: “He’s now having to suffer a penalty in Monza when he did nothing wrong here.
“That shows how difficult the process is, how difficult everything is to handle. There’s always improvements to be made,” Sainz says. “And it needs to be a collaboration between drivers, FIA and GPDA to try and find better solutions.
“Zandvoort exposed why we are not at the right level yet for such a difficult but incredible sport to watch,” he concluded.
