Carlos Sainz wants answers, and he wants them now.
On the eve of Las Vegas, the Williams driver – and newly minted GPDA director – called for an urgent sit‑down between drivers and the FIA after Oscar Piastri’s 10‑second penalty in Brazil, a decision Sainz branded “unacceptable” for a sport that loves to call itself the pinnacle.
The Sao Paulo flashpoint came at the Turn 1 restart, where Piastri and Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli tangled under braking. The chain reaction ended with Charles Leclerc pitched out of the race and Piastri later burdened with a 10‑second hit on his way to fifth. That may sound routine on paper; it isn’t. Piastri is chasing his McLaren teammate Lando Norris for the 2025 title and arrived at the final three rounds 24 points down, with Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to go. The margin for error is razor-thin, and so is the tolerance for what drivers see as misreads of hard racing.
“I think we need urgently a catch-up to try and solve it,” Sainz said. “The fact Oscar got a penalty there is unacceptable, honestly. Everyone who’s actually raced a car knows he could do nothing to avoid that accident.”
Sainz has more than a passing interest in the subject. Williams successfully overturned a Zandvoort penalty he received for contact with Liam Lawson earlier this year, wiping two penalty points from his licence. He also copped a 10‑second penalty in Austin for a brush with Antonelli, and saw Oliver Bearman penalised after the pair collided at Monza. You don’t need to read between the lines: he’s seeing a pattern.
“There’s been multiple incidents this year that, for me, are far from where the sport should be,” he said. “I didn’t understand my Zandvoort penalty before it was removed. I didn’t think Ollie deserved his at Monza. I didn’t get the 10 seconds in Austin. And then the Brazil situation.”
The nub of the argument isn’t new, but it’s become pressing. After the Norris/Verstappen flashpoints last season, the FIA updated its Driving Standards Guidelines and published them ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix in June. The question now is whether those guidelines have hardened into something closer to absolute rules, removing the space to call a racing incident a racing incident.
“It could go both ways,” Sainz admitted. “You could criticise how the guidelines are written and say the stewards are just applying them. Or you could ask the stewards to treat them as guidelines, not black-and-white rules. Either way, after what I saw in Brazil, something’s not quite working.”
One area he wants reviewed is how lockups are interpreted. A puff of tyre smoke has become a red flag to some stewards; to drivers, it’s part of the art.
“Whenever we see a lockup, I think a steward immediately reads ‘out of control,’” Sainz said. “A lockup doesn’t always mean that. You can still hit the apex. I locked up in Austin after reacting to Kimi’s move, and Oscar locked up in Brazil reacting too. That doesn’t mean we were going to fly off the road and cause a huge crash.”
Sainz’s fix is simple – and quietly radical for modern F1: continuity. A small panel of permanent stewards for the season, the same way the sport uses a fixed race director, to create a shared memory of what deserves a penalty and what doesn’t.
“With good, consistent stewarding from people who truly understand racing, we’d develop an understanding among all of us,” he argued. “You’d almost need no guardrails. If we had three fixed guys and built that muscle memory over a year, even without guidelines, we’d know when something’s a driver’s fault and when it’s just hard racing.”
Of course, there’s the evergreen caveat: most drivers’ definition of “consistent” is their rival getting the penalty. Sainz laughed at that. “I agree! It’s not easy. I don’t have the perfect solution. But that’s one thing we haven’t tried.”
A meeting between drivers and the FIA is expected to take place in Qatar, the penultimate stop on a title run-in already tense enough without debate over what constitutes avoidable contact. If the aim of last year’s guidelines was clarity, the view from the cockpit suggests they’ve instead narrowed the grey areas to the point where something always has to be someone’s fault.
That’s not the sport Sainz wants to race in – and not the one fans want to watch heading into a championship decider. With three rounds left and McLaren’s intra-team fight poised on a knife-edge, the interpretation of a lockup or a lunge could tilt the title. The drivers want the room to race; now it’s on the system to give it to them.
