Ferrari lose appeal against Carlos Sainz’s five-second penalty at Australian GP

Ferrari’s petition for a right of review into Carlos Sainz’s penalty at the Australian Grand Prix has been dismissed by the FIA.

The Spaniard dropped from fourth to 12th in Melbourne after being hit with a five-second time penalty for causing a collision.

With the race restarting on the penultimate lap of the grand prix, Sainz clipped the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso, who was running third at the time.

He had five seconds added to his race time as a result and was relegated out of the points, leaving Ferrari unhappy with the stewards’ decision and launching an appeal.

“There is no significant and relevant new element which was unavailable to the parties seeking the review at the time of the decision concerned. The petition is therefore dismissed,” an FIA statement read on Tuesday.

“We considered the fact that this collision took place at the first corner on the first lap of the restart, when, by convention, the stewards would typically take a more lenient view of incidents.

“However, we decided that notwithstanding that it was the equivalent of a first-lap incident, we considered that there was sufficient gap for SAI (Sainz) to take steps to avoid the collision and failed to do so. We therefore imposed a five-second time penalty.”

Ferrari issued their own statement following the rejection of their petition, accepting the decision while stressing they would seek further talks aimed at “improving the policing” in Formula One.

Statement from Scuderia Ferrari ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/LFEgGZkzRB

— Scuderia Ferrari (@ScuderiaFerrari) April 18, 2023

“We acknowledge the FIA decision not to grant us a right of review in relation to the penalty imposed on Carlos Sainz at the 2023 Australian Grand Prix,” it read.

“We are naturally