"I guess now if I'm on the outside I'll just go for it, no?" Oliver Bearman was in combative rather than apologetic mode in Baku when asked to reflect on the Monza penalty which has left him on the cusp of a one-race suspension.
Bearman was judged to have given Carlos Sainz insufficient room when the Williams driver made a dive around the outside at the Variante della Roggia chicane on lap 41 of the Italian Grand Prix. As well as a 10s time penalty, Bearman was given two penalty points which brings him to a total of 10.
Between then and now the picture has been muddied somewhat by Williams lodging a successful 'right of review' against Sainz’s penalty for a collision with Liam Lawson in the Dutch Grand Prix. Last week the FIA scrubbed Sainz’s two-point penalty and declared the crash a "racing incident".
In that, Sainz had also launched an overtake around the outside, and the contact was caused by what the stewards described as Lawson’s car suffering "a momentary loss of control".
The key question, and one which continues to vex, is when a driver is entitled to "racing room". In the Sainz-Lawson incident, even in striking off the penalty the FIA maintained that Sainz should not have been where he was.
"Car 55 [Sainz] contributed to the incident by taking the risk to drive close to, and on the outside of, Car 30 [Lawson] when Car 55 had no right to room there," said the stewards’ statement, "and there was a real possibility that, if the collision had not occurred where it did, Car 55 would run out of track at the exit and/or a collision would have occurred at the exit for which the Driver of Car 55 would likely be predominantly if not wholly to blame."
In other words, the mitigating circumstances were Lawson’s snap of oversteer rather than a different interpretation of the ‘racing guidelines’ to which drivers are expected to adhere. So the review has added to rather than subtracted from the dissatisfaction over F1’s present rules of engagement.
"It's my fault for getting the penalty regardless of if we agree with the rules or not," Bearman said in Baku. "But it's a tough one to take. That's not how any of us have grown up racing, really.
"The rules are the rules. I think as a racing driver and as a fan, it's tough to take that penalty – because from my side at no point was I out of control. I was totally just racing to the corner with another driver and then I didn't get left any space at all.
"In the end, that's what the rules state. So I do feel a little hard done by."
The problem with eliminating grey areas such as this is that it is impossible to create an effective manual of guidelines to cover every circumstance. Every "what if" is another mental page to leaf through as drivers bear down on a corner at the very limit of adhesion. The mental bandwidth to accomplish this does not exist.
"Imagine you're going into the corner, you have a guy alongside you," said Bearman. "You're deciding, OK, I'm going to fight for this corner. Because in my situation [Monza] he [Sainz] was a bit faster than me – but it wasn’t like he was catching me one second a lap.
"If I could have stayed in front in that corner, I would have been able to stay in front until the end of the race. So I had every intention to fight for the move.
"And in that split second where you brake and you see how fast you're entering the corner with respect to your competitor, you don't then think about the three-page guideline they sent you in January. It's not possible.
"So you race to the corner like you know how, like you've been brought up doing. In my situation, I expected a bit more space, but that's how it went."
Since the penalty points are accrued on a rolling 12-month basis, Bearman must keep his nose clean for the next four rounds – until the two points he accrued in the Brazilian Grand Prix last year drop off. It will then be a long wait for more to go: he earned two for a red-flag infringement in Monaco and four at Silverstone.
A change of approach is therefore required.
"I would hope to get given space on the inside, but clearly there's a possibility that that won't happen, so I can't take that risk," he said. "It's a shame. I guess I'll just go around the outside now…"
