Ferrari says it wants high-level discussions on the consistency of stewarding in Formula 1 after failing to have Carlos Sainz’s late-race penalty at the Australian Grand Prix overturned.
Sainz was handed a five-second penalty for hitting Fernando Alonso on lap 57 of 58 after the final standing restart. It was one of several crashes that suspended the race for a third time and forced a formation finish.
The punishment is the most lenient time penalty available to the stewards, but because the race finished with the cars bunched up behind the safety car, it dropped Sainz from fourth to 12th and out of the points.
It left Ferrari with just 26 points after three rounds, its worst start to a season since 2009.
The Scuderia took exception to the punishment both for the severe effect it had on the result and also because other drivers who caused more serious crashes on the same lap weren’t punished.
In the days after Australia Ferrari presented the stewards with three pieces of evidence it argued warranted the penalty being re-examined: telemetry data from Sainz car, a witness statement from the Spaniard and also post-race comments from some other drivers, including from Alonso, who said he thought the five-second penalty was harsh.
FIA regulations allow for certain decisions to be reviewed only upon the presentation of “significant and relevant” new elements to the case, but in a meeting on Tuesday night the Melbourne stewards flatly rejected Ferrari’s petition on the grounds none of the evidence was meaningful to their decision-making.
“The stewards have access to a considerable amount of telemetry data,” they said of Ferrari’s first point. “We were also in a position to access such data.
“The telemetry data presented in the petition is at best ambiguous and in our view did not exculpate [Sainz] but in fact corroborated our decision that he was wholly to blame for the collision.”
The stewards were similarly excoriating on the presentation of Sainz’s witness statement.
“First, had we thought that this required a statement from [Sainz] for us to analyse the event, we would have summoned him after the race,” they said. “We did not consider it necessary then to hear from him to decide that fact.
“His witness statement, in essence, states how poor the grip was … and how the sun was in his eyes. But logic would dictate that the position of the sun would have equally impacted other drivers too. It is not a justifiable reason to avoid a penalty for a collision.”
Finally, on the supporting comments from other drivers, the stewards said that “nothing stated in those comments were significant or indeed relevant to our considerations”.
Ferrari accepted the decision but isn’t prepared to let the issue slide completely. In a post-decision press release, the team said it wanted to use its failed review to start talks on the consistency of decision-making from the stewards office.
“We are now looking forward to entering broader discussions with the FIA, F1, and all the teams with the aim of further improving the policing of our sport in order to ensure the highest level of fairness and consistency that our sport deserves,” the team wrote.
Sainz also took to social media to call for an open discussion on the way the sport is refereed.
“The consistency and decision-making process has been a hot topic for many seasons now and we need to be clearer for the sake of our sport,” he wrote.
The Italian team was always unlikely to clear the hurdle to reopen the investigation, but Sainz’s penalty and the lack of action against other drivers did raise eyebrows after the race.
Pierre Gasly’s crash with Esteban Ocon put both into the wall and out of the race in a shower of carbon fibre, but the Frenchman escaped punishment on the grounds it was effectively a first-lap incident, coming immediately after a standing restart.
A penalty of any kind for Gasly almost certainly would have tipped him over 12 penalty points on his licence, which would have triggered an automatic one-race ban.
Logan Sargeant clumsily punting Nyck de Vries into the gravel at the first turn managed to escape an investigation entirely despite the crash putting both drivers out of the race.
The stewards were not required to address these matters in response to Ferrari’s petition, but they did reiterate their view that Sainz was so clearly at fault that the context of the crash occurring after a standing restart was irrelevant.
“Notwithstanding that it was the equivalent of a first-lap incident, we considered that there was sufficient gap for [Sainz] to take steps to avoid the collision and failed to do so,” they said.
Four stewards oversee each grand prix. Three are chosen by the FIA from a pool of rotating internationals stewards and one is selected by the host nation’s governing body as a local representative.
The stewards are supported by race control, which comprises largely permanent officials, as well as a remote operations centre based in Europe, though they operate independently from both. They have access to an enormous catalogue of past incidents and decisions used as precedents when undertaking new investigations as well as live telemetry data and camera angles.
The FIA has formerly used a permanent panel of stewards, but that model was open to criticisms of bias by teams and drivers when they felt they were unfairly penalised, leading to the establishment of the rotating stewards pool used today.
