Ferrari have confirmed they will ask the stewards of the Australian Grand Prix to reconsider and, they hope, overturn the penalty which cost Carlos Sainz Jnr fourth place in the race.
The FIA learned on Thursday last week the team has applied for a review of the penalty Sainz received for his collision with Fernando Alonso after the standing restart on lap 57 of the race.
Ferrari is taking advantage of the same ‘right of review’ procedure which Alonso’s team used to cancel a penalty he had been given in the previous round. But that was one of few occasions in recent history in which a team has successfully used the right of review to reverse a decision by the stewards.
As Ferrari knows, persuading the stewards to overturn a penalty decision is not easy. They tried to cancel the five-second time penalty which cost Sebastian Vettel victory in the 2019 Canadian Grand Prix, They tried to cancel“>but failed. The year before Williams also tried to provoke a review of incidents which occured during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, to no avail.
There were four unsuccessful review bids in 2021 alone, involving Mercedes at the Brazilian Grand Prix, Aston Martin at the Hungarian Grand Prix, Red Bull at the British Grand Prix and Alfa Romeo at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
The examples of successful cases are far fewer. In addition to Aston Martin, Red Bull won a hearing which led to Lewis Hamilton being penalised at the 2020 Austrian Grand Prix. Haas also won a right of review following the United States Grand Prix last year, though it was subsequently overturned following an appeal by rivals Alpine.
On sheer weight of numbers, Ferrari’s chances don’t look good. But do the substance of the cases give the team and its supporters grounds to be optimistic that Sainz may get his fourth place back?
Ferrari must convince the stewards of two points in order to win their case. First, they must show there is a significant and relevant new piece of evidence which the stewards should consider. Second, that evidence must convince the stewards to overturn the penalty.
Many bids for appeal have fallen at the first hurdle, including Ferrari’s 2019 effort. The team submitted a considerable amount of information which the stewards noted was not new.
Ferrari also provided a video analysis of the incident in question by former F1 driver-turned Sky television presenter Karun Chandhok. The stewards rejected this as “not significant and relevant as this is a personal opinion by a third party.” Hamilton, who gained the win due to Vettel’s penalty, later admitted he became “relaxed” about the threat to his victory after he learned Ferrari’s case rested in part on Chandhok’s analysis of it. They surely will not make the same mistake again.
New footage of an incident may provide valuable new insight. In 2020 Red Bull used a 360-degree video from Hamilton’s car which was not available to the stewards when they cleared him of failing to slow under yellow flags to prove he deserved a penalty. However discovering new video alone is no guarantee of success, as Mercedes discovered when they requested a review of a decision not to penalise Verstappen in the 2021 Brazilian Grand Prix.
Ferrari can probably forget about using more creative means of generating new ‘evidence’. Earlier in the bitter 2021 title fight Red Bull took the extraordinary step of using test driver Alexander Albon to recreate Hamilton’s driving line through Copse at Silverstone in an attempt to increase his penalty for colliding with Verstappen in the corner. The stewards rendered Albon’s labours worthless by noting new evidence must be “‘discovered’ (as opposed to created).”
It remains to be seen what new, relevant and significant evidence Ferrari may have discovered which they believe will prompt the stewards to rethink Sainz’s penalty. It is hard to imagine what aspect of the collision was missed in the many replays of the contact seen at the time.
Ferrari were especially frustrated the stewards did not give them an opportunity to put forward their version of events before penalising Sainz. The driver was distraught at his penalty, pleading with his team to speak with them. Vasseur echoed this grievance afterwards. “The biggest frustration was – and you heard it on the radio – to not have hearings,” he said.
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The FIA handed Sainz’s penalty down at 6:52pm, while the race was still under red flag and awaiting the final restart. A decision on another collision which happened at almost the same time, involving AlphaTauri drivers Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon, took over three-and-a-half hours longer to appear. “In this case, I think it would have made sense considering that the race was over, it was not affecting the podium, to have the hearing as Gasly and Ocon had,” Vasseur noted.
Ferrari may also seek to draw attention to the fact another incident occured at the same time which wasn’t even investigated by the stewards. Logan Sargeant ran into Nyck de Vries, ending the race for both drivers.
One unusual aspect of Sainz’s collision with Alonso is it was effectively rendered meaningless by the stewards’ subsequent decision to change the running order of the race. Alonso fell to the back of the field after Sainz knocked him into a barrier, but was restored to third place when the stewards took the hotly-debated decision to revert to the running order from before the restart and their collision. Ferrari may make to wish the case that as the foul was cancelled out, the penalty should be too.
But while there are many cases Ferrari may like to make, the need to supply evidence sets a high bar for them to do so. The team is clearly eager to ‘have its day on court’ over the Sainz penalty, and may have good arguments to make if it does, but whether they get that far is another matter entirely.
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