Lawson bites back at Sainz over Zandvoort clash: “If it was my fault, I’d have the penalty”
Liam Lawson isn’t wearing the blame for his Turn 1 tangle with Carlos Sainz — and he’s got the stewards’ paperwork to back him up.
Moments after a Safety Car restart at Zandvoort, Sainz tried the long way round Lawson into Tarzan. The Williams and the Racing Bulls brushed wheels, both picked up punctures, and any hope of points went up in orange smoke. Stewards looked at it, referenced the FIA’s overtaking guidelines introduced this season, and hit Sainz with a 10-second penalty for being “wholly or predominantly to blame.”
The key line in those guidelines is simple: if you’re attempting it around the outside, you need your front axle ahead at the apex to earn racing room. Sainz didn’t get there. Lawson did. Case closed, at least in Race Control.
It wasn’t nearly so tidy on the radios. Sainz, fuming, wanted a sit-down with the officials and later bristled that racing side-by-side with Lawson “always” seems to end in contact.
Lawson wasn’t having that. Asked if he’d change anything about how he fights in the pack, the Kiwi pointed to the one fact that matters in this debate: “He was overtaking me, and he got a penalty. He can say what he likes, but if it was my fault, I’d be the one penalised,” he said. “I get the frustration — I’ve been on the receiving end this year too. But the rules are written how they’re written, and we all know them.”
He also called the move what it was on a cold-tyre restart at Zandvoort: risky. “It ruined my day as well,” Lawson added. “It’s fine to go for it, but it’s slippery, it’s lap one of a restart, and in the end we made contact. That’s why he got the penalty.”
Both limped back to the pits with punctures, both rejoined, and both were left to pick off stragglers as the race ran away from them. Lawson came home 12th; Sainz finished 13th, behind the man he’d tried to clear in the first place.
There’s a wider trend here. The 2025 guidelines have taken a lot of grey out of wheel-to-wheel calls, especially at corners like Tarzan that invite big lunges. On the outside, you now have to get it done decisively by the apex. If you’re not there, you’re gambling the other guy will play generous. On a restart with marbles off-line and tyres like glass? That bet gets worse.
Sainz clearly feels Lawson plays the edges too often. Lawson’s view is that he plays to the book — the same book that’s burned him before when he’s misjudged an overlap. Somewhere in the middle is the reality of modern F1, where the margins are thinner and the penalties come quicker.
For Williams, it’s a costly self-inflicted wound on a day that looked ripe for solid points. For Racing Bulls, it snaps Lawson’s recent momentum after two scores on the bounce. For the rest of us, it’s a preview of the next drivers’ briefing, where this exact scenario will almost certainly be relitigated with the same slow-motion clips we’ve all seen by now.
File it under unfinished business. If they meet again in the braking zone at Monza, don’t expect either to flinch.
