The Australian GP, the third stop of the F1 World Cup season, was a crazy race, plagued with interruptions, with a restarted start and a hesitant finish, which fortunately resulted in another podium finish for Fernando Alonso. The one who did not have such a good day was Carlos Sainz, but at his own expense and responsibility.
With two laps to go, a red flag due to an accident by Magnussen led to a restarted start from the starting grid, with the Spaniard from Aston Martin in third position and Sainz just behind.
However, in the first corner, the Ferrari man entered past and touched Alonso’s car enough to throw him off the track but not so much as to put him out of the race. The Spaniard returned quickly to the asphalt, but in eleventh position.
The indignation grew on Twitter where the curious circumstance occurred that, despite being both Spanish, the ferrarista what had just happened made him uglyfor depriving Alonso of the podium despite the fact that he had taken third place.
As it was, luck smiled on Aston Martin because, thanks to a subsequent red flag due to accidents at the back of the race, previous positions recovered to the restart because the first sector of lap 57 had not been completed at the time of the break.
Something, by the way, that Alonso himself realized seconds after the clash with Sainz. He asked his team by radio to check if there was indeed the possibility of returning to the original positions.
Therefore, Fernando Alonso returned to third place to which he seems to have subscribed to the joy of an entire country and Sainz, who had finished fourth, was relegated to twelfth position for a questionable penalty of 5 seconds.
The Spaniard from Ferrari was punished for the incident with Alonso, although the punishment was enough to stay off the podium again. Despite being a clear race action, the stewards showed no mercy to the Scuderia.
Carlos himself refused to refer to the action after the race: “I prefer not to speak,” he said before the cameras, after having lamented on the radio before his team: “It is a very severe sanction.” It is.
However, the FIA does not think so. In the statement from the body after the race and with respect to the sanction, they point to Sainz as “totally guilty” for an action in which “there was sufficient margin for car 55 to take the appropriate measures to avoid a collision and not do so.” did”.