Sep.1 (GMM) Carlos Sainz’s season of frustration boiled over at Zandvoort, as the Williams driver lashed out at rival Liam Lawson and the FIA stewards.
Without a Ferrari seat for 2025 and overlooked by the other top teams too, Sainz’s patience appeared to be turning into rage after the Dutch GP.
“Today, the story of my season,” he scowled after finishing outside the points.
“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 flashpoint came in a clash with Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson, who earlier this year was dropped by Red Bull’s senior team.
Sainz was hit with a 10-second penalty – a decision he labelled “the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life.”
“Maybe it’s about picking battles better,” he told DAZN. “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 forcing him to close me up so he could get a bit on dirty tyres, and from there I had a chance on the next lap. Yet he decided it was better to open the wheel and crash than to just hold it.”
Sainz contrasted Lawson with the “top drivers” he has raced in the recent past.
“There are drivers with whom you can go wheel to wheel with – Checo, Fernando, Gasly, Verstappen, Leclerc, Piastri,” he said. “With Liam, it’s not the first time this has happened with him in this category, but it is what it is.”
He went further in comments to Spanish newspaper El Mundo Deportivo, accusing the New Zealander of seizing “an opportunity to put a driver out.”
Asked if Lawson was a dirty driver, Sainz replied: “No, but he prefers contact to being overtaken.”
As for the stewards’ call, he was similarly scathing.
“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 at all. Someone has to explain this to me.
“What I believe I suffered today worries me for myself but also for motorsport in general. To give a penalty to the guy on the outside, who has nothing to do with the collision, seems outrageous to me and a brutal lack of coherence.”
Sainz, newly installed as a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, vowed to take the matter further. “I think that as director of the GPDA, it obviously worries me, it worries me a lot,” he said.
“I will go to the FIA and I will have them explain it to me.”
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