Carlos Sainz wants a new rule to deter drivers from deliberately causing red flags in a qualifying session.
It is a tactic that is difficult to prove, but which has been suspected in Formula 1 for many years. It has been suggested that, on some occasions, drivers have been accused of setting a strong time and then crashing with the intention of ruining others' chances of beating them.
The subject has been brought into focus again by speculation in the wake of Max Verstappen's refusal to let Sergio Perez pass him at the Brazilian Grand Prix last weekend. Some reports have claimed it had something to do with the Mexican's crash in Monaco qualifying earlier this year which adversely affected his team-mate – a rumour Perez has denied.
Sainz was involved in that particular incident as he struck the Red Bull, causing damage to his own car. Speaking about it on Thursday, the Spaniard told reporters he feels steps need to be taken to make sure a driver cannot benefit from an intentional crash.
"Without commenting if it was on purpose or not, I think it's for real now that all drivers want some kind of a rule that, if you generate a red flag or a yellow flag, even if it's intentional or not, there should be something done to that driver, because you've compromised the other nine on purpose, or maybe not," said the Ferrari driver.
"But you should get a penalty for it. If not, we're all going to start playing with it. And I've seen over the last few years a lot more play around with it than what you might even have picked out in the media. I think all 20 drivers in ourselves, when we analyse these kind of incidents, we know immediately that whoever has done it on purpose or not, because we're not stupid.
"But I'm not going to comment, it's an incident of the past. I'm just going to say that if there would be a rule in then it wouldn't even go through your head. I think it would [reward] Q3 laps, because it means that in Q3, there's a lot to win, but also something to lose.
"So you need to put a really good lap together with no mistakes if you want to take a position." Asked about the frequency of examples of suspected deliberate crashes, Sainz added that it is "not regular", but suggested that it has happened commonly enough for it to have become a genuine issue.
"There's been enough times already that there should be kind of a rule for it," he said. "I think it's yet to be discussed. I think we've raised it a few times, but it's never been concluded into something. But I think for next year, it should be done.
"I think either laps cancelled, though, or three or five places penalty if you put a yellow flag or a red flag in quali, which means the incentive of doing that goes away immediately. And it also forces us drivers to behave and to be committed to the lap, but also with a level of maybe leaving half a percent on the table."
