Scuderia Ferrari ended the Australian Grand Prix without any points scored, but also with a sense of injustice due to the five-second time penalty received by Carlos Sainz in the final stages of the Melbourne event. As a result, the Italian side submitted a ‘right of review’ with the goal of trying to remove Carlos Sainz’s time penalty in the Australian Grand Prix, which would allow him to score 12 points for fourth place at the Albert Park circuit.
The Maranello team is confident that Carlos Sainz’s five-second time penalty will be cancelled and his fourth-place reinstated instead of an outside top ten finish which was confirmed at the end of the Australian Grand Prix last weekend.
Carlos Sainz was unlucky with the first red flag of the Melbourne race, on lap 7, when Alex Albon crashes his Williams car: the Safety Car was initially deployed and Ferrari called the Spanish driver to the pits for a tyre change. However, just a few moments later, the red flag was shown, which meant the rest of the grid was able to change the tyres without losing any time.
Carlos Sainz was able to recover and moved up to P4, before receiving a penalty for the collision with the Aston Martin car of Fernando Alonso at the final race restart. The Ferrari man was not able to explain his actions in front of the stewards, who immediately issues a five-second penalty, with Carlos almost crying on the team radio when being informed by his Ferrari race engineer, Riccardo Adami, of the stewards’ decision.
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The right of review is allowed in the FIA International Sporting Code. This means that a team has the possibility to explain its point of view, but a “significant and relevant new element [that was] unavailable to the parties seeking the review at the time of the decision concerned,” must be introduced, based on the current rules.
The Maranello team must therefore come up with some clear new evidence which was not available to the race stewards when the incident took place and they made the initial call to hand Carlos the penalty. However, the Italian side is well aware that such a process is difficult to have a successful outcome, as was the case four years ago, when Sebastian Vettel was racing for the Scuderia and was robbed of a race win at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
The Sebastian Vettel precedent from the 2019 Formula 1 campaign
We all remember the events which took place in the 2019 Canadian Grand Prix, when Scuderia Ferrari German driver Sebastian Vettel was on his way to taking the race win at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, leading the race after starting from pole position.
Yet on Lap 48 of 70, while defending against the faster Mercedes car of Lewis Hamilton, Seb ran wide at the Turn 3 chicane, cutting across the grass and returing ahead of the British driver. However, the race stewards considered that he rejoined the track in an unsafely manner and blocked Lewis Hamilton, therefore handing the Ferrari man a five-second time penalty.
Sebastian Vettel reached the checkered flag in P1, but with a gap of less than two seconds ahead of his rival, which meant that Hamilton was given the race win. The Maranello team attempted to overturn the decision by using the same procedure as for Carlos Sainz in Australia.
An explanation from Sebastian Vettel, which was not possible during the Montreal race, was deemed as part of the appeal package. Unfortunately, the bar to clear the “significant and relevant new element” of evidence proved too high for the Italian side. A few days later, it was revealed that the Maranello team also introduced video footage from an analysis made by Sky Sport F1 expert Karun Chandhok following the Canadian Grand Prix, but this was considered by the FIA as being just the “opinion of a third party” and therefore not seen as relevant. The penalty was not changed and Sebastian Vettel had to settle for P2.
As a result, it is difficult to believe that Ferrari can produce some “significant and relevant new element” in Carlos Sainz’s case, except for the Spanish driver’s testimony, given how well documented it was. There is also talk of telemetry data that Ferrari want to present to the stewards.
However, despite the difficulty in overturning such a decision, it is not completely, as proven by Red Bull three years ago.
One key aspect which may help the Maranello team in their attempt to cancel Carlos Sainz’s five-second time penalty is the fact that officially, the crash never even took place. The moment occurred on Lap 57 of the Australian Grand Prix, yet following the chaos represented by several crashes, the race was again red-flagged. At that stage, the driver who was leading the race, Max Verstappen, did not make it to the Sector 1 timing line, which meant that no clear race order could be established by the FIA.
As a result, the FIA had to look back at the last race order, which was the one at the moment of the red flag – except of course for anyone who was involved in crashes. It was therefore a strange situation at the Albert Park track, given the fact that when he came back into the pits under this third red flag, the Red Bull driver officially began the last lap of the Australian Grand Prix, with a rolling restart leading to the final order of the race, without the possibility for anyone to improve their position.
This meant that Fernando Alonso got back his P3, after being sent outside the top ten due to the incident with Carlos Sainz, which therefore never happened at all.
Scuderia Ferrari could argue that if an incident never officially even took place, how can Carlos Sainz be given a penalty for it?
The Italian side could also point out to the fact that Williams’ Logan Sargeant was not even investigated for hitting the back of Nyck de Vries at the final restart, which is clearly a more dangerous move and a more egregious breach of the regulation as compared to what Carlos Sainz did by tagging Fernando Alonso, especially considering that the Aston Martin car still finished in third place.
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