Carlos Sainz, a Ferrari F1 driver, was given a five second penalty before the last lap of the Australian Grand Prix due to causing a collision with Fernando Alonso on lap 57 of the race, which put him in p12 and out of the points.
Carlos Sainz. Source.
The race had a standing restart after a red flag caused all track activity and racing to stop to not put drivers in harms way on the track. Standing restarts have been controversial in the past as they out everyone on a level playing field while when the red flag occurred some people were 40+ seconds behind the leader. Standing starts are also controversial due to their high accident proneness, which is what happened on lap 57 which caused the third red flag to occur (for reference the Australian Grand Prix is only 58 laps and this was an extremally frustrating call).
Other accidents happening during standing starts and the original race start during the grand prix, including a collision that happened between Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon and another with Logan Sargeant and Nyck de Vries. Neither of those two accidents were investigated further or given penalties. Both of these accidents, specifically the Sargeant and de Vries accident, was very similar to the Sainz crash but nothing was investigated further.
When the penalty was awarded, Sainz was clearly in distress, even pleading “please, please, please, please wait to discuss with me” over his radio to his engineer that this could not be right and it was not deserved. In interviews after the race, Sainz said it was the “most unfair penalty I’ve ever seen in my life”.
Five days after the Australian Grand Prix, Ferrari submitted a petition to the FIA to look into the penalty and reopen the case. The only reason the case would be reopened is if Ferrari provided new evidence, which was not disclosed other than “car data” that was not available until a few days after.
The PR Problem is that the FIA is very wishy washy with how they handle penalties. Penalties are game time decisions decided by a group of officials who think about what the right call is. Another famous racing incident was back in 2021 during the final race of Verstappen and Hamilton and it is still considered to be the most controversial call of F1 history. The FIA needs to create a hard set of guidelines of how to handle penalties and how to make the correct calls in the future. Whether that is by having multiple committees have checks and balances on the decisions made or even using AI in the future to help determine what racing accidents deserve penalties. There are many ways to go about solutions for this problem, but the FIA should solve this sooner rather than later to make the racing rules more clear and concise to not only teams and drivers but fans as well. c