'Sainz was the real offender deserving of a Belgian GP penalty'

Some will argue that it’s an incontrovertible fact that Hamilton clobbered Perez’s sidepod, ultimately causing Red Bull to retire the car, so obviously deserved a penalty. But, when you look at the sequence, Perez is nowhere near the apex at the previous corner and any racing driver worth his salt, let alone a seven-time world champion, is going to fill the gap that Sergio left.

The field was all on intermediates and Perez, fourth, was already losing ground to Verstappen, Piastri and Gasly. He seemed gripless, struggling to get the inters into a decent temperature window, something we’d also seen in recent mixed weather qualifying sessions.

“He was pretty slow and went wide through Turn 14,” Hamilton explained. “I got a great exit, was more than half a car alongside him and we just ended up coming together. It was a bit of a racing incident really. It wasn’t intentional but the stewards saw it differently. It was tricky conditions out there.”

A man who has won 104 grands prix and isn’t presently fighting for that eighth title, is not about to get too hot under the collar about a couple of lost Sprint race points but you had to sympathise with him. Okay, he might have taken a bit of wet inside kerb and may have understeered ever so slightly into the Red Bull’s side, but Perez, who is not exactly delicate in wheel-to-wheel combat was probably nipping him in as well, trying to slow Lewis’s exit.

The point is, one of the reasons that the Sprint format was changed so that it no longer dictated Sunday’s grid, was to encourage drivers to take a bit more risk on Saturday without potentially compromising their Sunday. All in the interests of better racing. To then penalise them for doing so, all seems a bit counter-intuitive. Okay, you still have to referee, but cut them a bit of slack. Especially considering that it was Spa in the wet and, as Hamilton pointed out, pretty tricky.

Inevitably there was social media vitriol, much of it aimed at Derek Warwick, the driver steward last weekend. I variously read that ‘Del Boy’ was ‘overly sensitive’ and that he had come down on Perez’s side because, of course, he runs Derek Warwick Honda, his large Jersey-based car dealership.

You could only laugh. The stewards, quite correctly, do not discuss their personal opinions but it’s worth pointing out that Warwick’s view of the incident was only one of four. The other three stewards may have had the same, or different takes.

And I doubt anyone who raced Derek feels he is overly sensitive. As he told Simon Taylor in ‘Lunch with’ many moons ago, he cut his racing teeth in Superstox, on cinder tracks like Wimbledon and White City, against tough scrap dealers who appreciated a fight as much as a race.

He was young and talented but the Establishment used to keep punting him off. When it happened to him at Aldershot while leading on the last lap, he backed out of the barrier, waited for the unscrupulous winner to come around on his lap of honour waving the chequered flag, charged him full side-on and barrel-rolled him over the fence onto the dog track. “I was banned for three months but when I came back I had respect and everyone left me alone,” Warwick remembered.

Overly sensitive? Nope. One of the straightest men you’ll find in a paddock? Yep. Thirty-odd years ago, I had to phone him right after he’d lost his little brother, Paul, in an F3000 crash at Oulton Park and always remember the way he handled himself. People speak of Jochen Rindt as the sport’s only posthumous champion, but Paul was one too. And if anyone deserves respect, it’s Derek Warwick.

A day later, the stewards let Sainz/Piastri go. Carlos later blamed Oscar’s inexperience but that’s not quite the way I saw it. Sainz, on softs, gets a better launch than the medium-shod Piastri and moves right, then changes his mind and jinks to the left, behind Hamilton’s Mercedes. He then seems to have been caught out by Lewis’s relative early braking behind Leclerc and Perez, and locks up the right front, simultaneously moving back towards the inside.

Piastri, meanwhile, has never deviated from the inside line after a slower launch and is actually going faster than Sainz when they reach the critical point, because Carlos was trapped behind Lewis. There is nothing he can do and Sainz, arguably should have known he was there. There’s always someone on the inside on the run to La Source, even if it doesn’t always end well. Verstappen, remember, in 2016, got away with the inside after contact with Vettel and Raikkonen in the Ferraris. They though, had left room for him.

A penalty for Sainz might have been harsh but I’d argue he was more deserving of one than Hamilton. The consequences too, were far more annoying. Piastri, brilliant all weekend up to that point, was a key point of interest for the race. He’d candidly admitted he hadn’t made the best use of his tyres in the Budapest race, that he needed to learn more about that. Would he do better at Spa? Alas, we didn’t get to find out. But his time will come.