Was Sainz really to blame? Davidson sides with Bearman as ban threat looms
The Monza flashpoint between Carlos Sainz and Oliver Bearman isn’t going away quietly. The stewards pinned the lap-41 tangle on the Haas rookie and handed him more penalty points. Anthony Davidson, after a slow-mo deep dive on the Sky pad, isn’t buying it.
“That one in Monza was on Sainz,” was the gist of Davidson’s take. His argument: the clip used in most replays is too tight, makes it look like Bearman lunged down the inside. Widen the frame, he says, and you see Sainz sweeping around the outside into the second chicane and squeezing a car that was already there. No room, no escape, contact inevitable. In Davidson’s words, the guidelines are just that — guidelines — and applied a little too literally in this instance.
The officials saw it very differently on Sunday. Their view was that Sainz, now a Williams driver in 2025, had earned the right to the racing line and that Bearman should’ve ceded. Result: another painful add to Bearman’s super licence tally, nudging him to 10 penalty points and placing him one mistake away from an automatic race ban.
That’s a brutal place for any 20-year-old to be, never mind one in his first full season. It’s also an awkward echo of Haas’ 2024 headache, when Kevin Magnussen reached the 12-point limit and the team had to swap him out — with Bearman, no less — for Baku. The symmetry is not lost on anyone in the paddock: if Bearman trips the wire now, Ryo Hirakawa would be in line for a debut with Haas. No one at Kannapolis wants to make that call.
Bearman’s year has been a mix of flashes and fumbles. The speed is obvious — there’s a tidy 16 points on the board and a best of sixth at Zandvoort — but the rough edges have been costly. The tally has built up bit by bit: a clash with Franco Colapinto during one of his 2024 stand-in drives, a red-flag overtake miscue in Monaco practice this season, a pit-entry shunt at Silverstone under reds, and now Monza. None egregious in isolation; together, a hand grenade with the pin halfway out.
Davidson’s broader message was less finger-pointing and more about the job in front of Bearman: the pace is the part you can’t teach; the consistency is the bit you can. That’s where rookies either harden into proper operators or burn up on re-entry. And the next stop is Baku — not exactly the gentlest of circuits for a driver in damage-limitation mode.
Bearman himself was diplomatic but clearly frustrated. He called the current driving guidelines “vague in some areas and quite specific in others,” and felt the Monza call was harsh for a scenario where the door closed as he was already committed. He knows bias cuts both ways, but he also knows what it felt like in the cockpit.
This is where the tension sits for F1 in 2025: the sport wants hard, wheel-to-wheel racing and ever-younger talents coming through with swagger, while the super licence system asks for pain-free consistency from drivers who are inevitably still learning. The intent is safety and clarity. The reality can feel a little arbitrary when split-second judgment calls are graded by a set of bullet points.
From Haas’ perspective, there’s a pragmatic truth: bear down, cool the elbows, and get through Baku clean. The car’s capable of points on merit, and Bearman’s already proven he can deliver them. The rookie’s ceiling is high enough that this shouldn’t define his season — or him.
As for Sainz, he won’t love the narrative that he crowded a rival and got away with it, especially as Williams fights tooth-and-nail in the midfield. But this is modern F1: interpretations swing, decisions calcify, and the debate rolls on long after the chequered flag. On Sunday, the law said Bearman was wrong. On Monday, the court of paddock opinion issued an appeal.
The only fact that matters now is this: one more misstep, and Haas has a very different weekend on its hands. Baku’s walls don’t do sympathy. Neither do 12 penalty points.
