Sainz fury erupts over Lawson clash and FIA penalty

Carlos Sainz’s simmering frustration finally boiled over at Zandvoort, as the Williams driver blasted both rival Liam Lawson and Formula 1’s stewards.

Shut out of Ferrari for 2025 and overlooked by other leading teams, the Spaniard has been visibly wound tighter with every lost opportunity this season.

On Sunday, it snapped. “Today, the story of my season,” he growled after another race that promised points but delivered nothing. “I’m starting to get really angry, because another weekend I’m going fast, another weekend I was ahead of Alex (Albon) once again, and you see Alex finish P5 and me finish outside the points when I was ahead.”

The breaking point came in a bruising scrap with Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson, a driver himself demoted by Red Bull earlier this year. Sainz not only left Zandvoort without points, but also having served a 10-second penalty for the incident. He was livid.

“The most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life,” he fumed. To DAZN, he argued that Lawson was simply impossible to race against: “It’s clear that Lawson isn’t someone you can even attempt going wheel to wheel with.

"Honestly, I wasn’t even trying to overtake. I was trying to set him up for the next lap. Yet he decided it was better to open the wheel and crash than to just hold it.”

For Sainz, the contrast with the sport’s established names could not be clearer. “There are drivers with whom you can go wheel to wheel, Checo, Fernando, Gasly, Verstappen, Leclerc, Piastri. With Liam, it’s not the first time. It is what it is.”

In El Mundo Deportivo, he went further – suggesting Lawson saw “an opportunity to put a driver out.” When asked directly if Lawson was a dirty driver, Sainz replied: “No, but he prefers contact to being overtaken.”

If the clash left him fuming, the stewards’ response enraged him. “That the driver on the outside is now a passenger in response to what the driver on the inside decides to do seems unbelievable and makes no sense. Someone has to explain this to me,” Sainz said. “To give a penalty to the guy on the outside, who has nothing to do with the collision, seems outrageous and a brutal lack of coherence.”

Now a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, Sainz vowed not to let the matter drop. “As director of the GPDA, it worries me a lot,” he declared. I will go to the FIA and I will have them explain it to me.”