15/09/2024
NEWS STORY
The Baku stewards have decided to take no further action over today's incident involving Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz as they battled for second.
The stewards heard from both drivers and their team representatives in addition to reviewing positioning/marshalling system data, video, and in-car video evidence.
Sainz and Perez made contact and crashed shortly after Turn 2 on lap 50 in a situation where a small touch had significant consequences.
The stewards reviewed how the incident occurred, not the consequence.
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 of the Ferrari, with the Spaniard admitting that he was aware of the Red Bull 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 1 metre apart.
From this point and throughout the incident, neither driver steered erratically, and indeed both kept their steering very neutral.
The stewards checked the driving line of the drivers on pervious laps. Sainz was on or close to his normal racing line, which forms a slight angle away from the right hand wall. From the exit to the point of contact he moved approximately one car width further away from the wall. Perez moved approximately half a car width further away from the same wall, being more parallel to the right hand wall.
It was thus apparent that while ahead, and having the right to drive his line, Sainz did move slightly towards a car that he had limited vision of. At the same time, there was nothing unusual about Perez' line, but he could have done more to avoid the car that he had better view of.
In conclusion, the stewards deemed this to be a racing incident with neither driver being predominantly at fault, and opted to take no further action.
"I did my normal racing line," said Sainz in the moments after the race. "I didn't do any strange manoeuver or anything. And for some reason that I still don't understand, we collided and yeah, I think he had plenty of space to the left.
"I do my normal racing line and the line that we all do in every lap of this track," he added, "exit in Turn 2, we always drift a bit towards the left, but without doing any weird or erratic manoeuvre.
"Charles in front of me is going to the left also, I'm 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."
"I was just looking at the replay," said Christian Horner ahead of the stewards decision, 2and you can see Carlos start to drift across the circuit. So, very disappointing, he should at very least have been on the podium today.
"It has destroyed the race for Checo today," he added, "cost us a lot of damage and obviously vital points in the constructors' championship."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Baku here.