FIA stewards criticized for turning a blind eye to 'dangerous incident'

Sainz got away well from the line and went for a gap when he caught Lindblad ahead of him. The British driver closed the door along the front straight and pushed Sainz into the wall. Sainz avoided a heavy crash, but the damage hurt his first stint and he later had to pit for a new front wing. He finished 18th, one lap down.

Speaking to the media, Sainz said rivals have started trying to unsettle Williams at the start because the team keeps launching so well. "I'm surprised he got away with that because, obviously, he's putting someone in the wall and creating what could have potentially been a very big accident," he said.

He added that the front wing change made for a slow stop: "On top of that, obviously a slow pit stop to change the front wing, seven, eight seconds extra, but then I managed to recover from there, and I settled down into a decent pace for the rest of the race."

The Williams driver then said: "We've all been too much one or two times. What I'm surprised is that when you are too much, you get away with it. And whenever I've been too much, I never get away with it. But, yeah, I'm surprised that today, yeah, someone got away with it, because it was a pretty nasty moment there on the wall."

Sainz is not the only driver questioning the officials after Sunday's race. George Russell got a five-second penalty for leaving the track at Turn 12 and keeping his place ahead of Oscar Piastri. The stewards confirmed the usual sanction would have been ten seconds, but they halved it because he had been fighting Isack Hadjar at the time and it happened on the opening lap. Over the team radio, Russell was not happy with the decision.

Oliver Bearman, meanwhile, called his ten-second penalty for the collision with Pierre Gasly "crazy" and "very excessive", arguing that worse incidents this season had earned five seconds or nothing at all.