F1 stewards' take on big Sainz/Perez crash - and ours

The big Azerbaijan Grand Prix podium battle crash involving Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez was deemed a "racing incident" by the Formula 1 stewards, with some blame attributed to both sides.

Both Perez's Red Bull team and Sainz's Ferrari team - as well as the two drivers involved - pointed the finger straight at the other side in the aftermath, with Red Bull team boss Christian Horner even going as far as to say he would be "very disappointed" if Sainz escaped sanction.

Yet the stewards' panel, which this weekend includes three-time F1 grand prix winner Johnny Herbert, underlined that it was taking its decision based on "how the incident occurred" and not its "significant" consequence - and felt neither driver could be predominantly blamed.

The two sides

Sainz and Perez collided on the penultimate lap in the race, put on a collision course by Sainz's team-mate Charles Leclerc slowing down with a loss of rear grip up ahead of them.

Leclerc's robust defence of second against Perez allowed Sainz to pick him off on exit of Turn 1, but when then trying to attack Leclerc himself Sainz went wide through Turn 2 - meaning Perez's front tyres drew narrowly ahead of Sainz's rears coming out of the corner, with the Mexican on the inside.

As Sainz gradually moved away from the outside wall, the two cars came together, spearing hard into the left-side wall instead and putting both out on the spot.

"In my opinion Carlos moved too quickly to follow the tow from Charles," said Perez to Sky Sports.

"It was just wrong time, wrong moment and it resulted in a huge shunt."

His team boss Horner was more firm in his assessment - basing it off the footage being replayed repeatedly during Sky pundit Karun Chandhok's in-paddock analysis, and largely aligning with Chandhok's assessment that track markings showed it was Sainz who triggered the crash.

"You can quite clearly see that Carlos… if you take the wall as a reference and the white line on the right-hand side of the track, you see him look in his mirror and just drift to the left," said Horner.

"So... knowing that he [Perez] was there. And Checo doesn't move. Left or right. So, hugely frustrating, to lose that.

"I would've expected, from what I've just seen, causing that kind of incident, collision - I would be very disappointed if he [Sainz] weren't to take some form of penalty."

Sainz, for his part, hadn't seen a replay by the time he faced the media but emphasised he was simply following his normal racing line.

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"I didn't do any strange manoeuvre or anything, and for some reason that I still don't understand we collided," he lamented. "I feel he had plenty of space to the left. I didn't do any strange movement.

"But I guess that's racing. Sometimes you do 48 laps without anything and then you get to three, two laps to go, and things like this happen.

"I did my normal racing line and the line that we all do in every lap of this track - exiting Turn 2 we always drift a bit towards the left and without doing any weird or erratic manoeuvre, Charles in front of me is going to the left also, and just following his slipstream obviously, and I don't know, Checo I think decides not to give in any kind of movement or space. But it's too early to say."

And as for Horner's sharp words, they were met by equally sharp words from Sainz's team boss Fred Vasseur.

"If Horner is expecting a great penalty for Carlos, I'm expecting a great penalty for Checo," he said, pointing out that Perez had "five metres" of room on the left-hand side.

The stewards' assessment

"This is a situation where a small touch had significant consequences," wrote the stewards of the accident.

"Sainz passed Perez after Turn 1 and was completely ahead at the apex of Turn 2. With a compromised exit by Sainz, Perez pulled to the inside.

"Sainz reported that he was aware of Perez to his inside. Perez, being slightly behind, was in a better position to see the relative location of the cars. But as the two cars approached the wall on the right at the exit of Turn 2, they were about one metre apart.

"From this point and throughout the incident, neither driver steered erratically, and indeed both kept their steering very neutral.”

The stewards then corroborated Sainz's assertion that he was "on or close to his normal racing line", while Perez was "more parallel to the right-hand wall" (although they acknowledged this line as "nothing unusual").

They said Sainz "had the right to drive his line" - but also that he "did move slightly towards a car that he had limited vision of". On Perez's side, they said he "could have done more to avoid the car that he had better view of".

So while a degree of fault was attributed to both drivers, neither was "predominantly at fault" and thus neither was penalised.

Our take

It would've been difficult for the F1 stewards to justify any other verdict under F1's general precedent - as both drivers' onboards confirm, plain as day (despite Horner's and Perez's claims of sudden movement), that neither driver meaningfully altered their steering angle after the initial exit phase.

The hearing had been scheduled for 17:30 local time, and the verdict came out at 18:13 local. By F1 standards, with a crash like that, that's lightning fast - but such was the nature of the accident.

A "racing incident" doesn't feel like the right kind of terminology for a dumb-looking crash in which two cars effectively drive into each other at speed with lots of racing room either side, but under F1's current framework there is no strong argument to be made for either side to be deemed "predominantly at fault".

If the primary motivation of the stewards' punitive measures is discouraging repeat action, you could probably make a case that actually both drivers should've been penalised - but that would not sit well with fans or with drivers or with the people making the decisions, and though consequences are in theory not considered it is also true that both Sainz and Perez were penalised enough for what is probably most aptly described as just a general carelessness towards each other's races - and their own races, too.