Vasseur disappointed: 'They could have listened to us'

Sainz was one of the biggest victims of the chaotic final stage of the Australian Grand Prix. On the second restart, Sainz made contact with Fernando Alonso, forcing Alonso off the track and back to the back of the field. Sainz received a five-second time penalty for the incident, which meant he was completely out of the points in the final result. Sainz and Alonso both judged that the penalty was too harsh, partly because race control eventually put the standings back to how they were before the restart.

"To get penalised like this at the end is very harsh," is also Vasseur's assessment to Channel 4. " He was not far away from the podium, he was P4. He did a mega job. I think we can discuss [for] hours about the penalty if it’s harsh or not. Depending on the position of your team, the analysis will be different, but I think what is a shame for me is that considering it was not impacting the podium, at least the stewards could’ve listened and had a look at the data."

'With Alonso, they changed their minds twice in 10 minutes'

"I think this is a bit of a shame," Vasseur continued. "Last week we changed the regulations two times in 10 minutes about the pit stop for Alonso and they could have done the same today, or at least discussed it. They took 30 laps to decide if Alonso was into the box or not. Today took five seconds. With an incident on track you always have two cars in the incident and you have two ways of seeing the incident. I think in this kind of situation we could take five minutes to discuss and to have a look at the data."