A blue-flag failure gave Sainz an excuse for his contact with Piastri, but his own onboard shows he had several warnings before he cost the McLaren driver's race lead at Turn 2
Carlos Sainz called it a racing incident. Oscar Piastri called it “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen on a race track.”
The stewards split the difference: Sainz was “wholly responsible” for the collision that cost Piastri the lead of the Hungarian Grand Prix, yet he walked away with a five-second penalty that made no real difference to his result, having struggled at the back all race long.
Both halves of that verdict are worth taking apart.
On lap 38, as Sainz fought Fernando Alonso for position, Piastri – running in the net lead after his second stop – arrived to lap them both.
Sainz cut back to the racing line at Turn 2 and collided with the McLaren. Piastri avoided serious damage but lost more than two seconds negotiating the mess, just enough for Lando Norris to complete his own stop and emerge ahead of his team-mate for what became a race-winning net lead.
Piastri retired later with a gearbox failure, so the incident’s cost to his afternoon can be measured only in the position he lost at Turn 2, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
The context Sainz leaned on afterwards was real: F1’s automated blue-flag system had been feeding drivers erroneous lapping warnings from the opening laps, forcing the FIA to disable it and fall back on marshal-operated light panels and manual radio calls.
Sainz said he never received a warning on his steering wheel, was fully focused on Alonso, and that Piastri was “in my dead spot” at the moment of contact.
Piastri was furious with Sainz after the incident
McLaren
He accepted the penalty without much complaint – “I don’t care when I’m fighting for P18” – but was pointed in suggesting Piastri should have been “more cautious” given he was the one racing for the win.
The excuse doesn’t hold up to the onboard
The problem with treating the system failure as the whole story is that the steering wheel lights were only one layer of the warning chain, and by Sainz’s own team’s account, he wasn’t left in the dark.
The stewards’ own findings note that Williams‘ pit wall had told him blue flags were being shown for the approach of Piastri’s car before the contact happened, not after.
“Blue flag of Piastri,” Sainz was told on the radio as he approached Turn 1 on lap 38.
More strikingly, the onboard footage from Sainz’s car shows him passing physical blue-light panels around the circuit multiple times in the lap before the collision.
The first blue lights appear at the end of lap 37 at Turns 12a, 13, 14 and then at the start and end of the main straight. Then again at the exit of Turn 1, on the approach to Turn 2, and then on Turn 2 itself.
So a total of eight separate instances of blue lights appeared before Sainz made contact with Piastri.
That undercuts Sainz’s “I had no idea Piastri was there” framing considerably.
Sainz’s penalty made no difference to his result
Grand Prix Photo
A malfunctioning steering-wheel display is a legitimate mitigating detail. Being told by your own pit wall, and passing marshal panels showing blue lights on repeated occasions, and still not registering that a lapping car is imminent, is a different claim entirely – one about situational awareness in a wheel-to-wheel fight, not one about broken technology.
Piastri’s own response didn’t dispute that the electronic system had failed; he rejected the idea that its failure excused the outcome, pointing out the marshal-operated panels were still functioning.
“For me, there’s no excuse at all,” he said. “That’s got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen on a race track.”
Sainz’s insistence that Piastri “should have been more cautious” – essentially arguing the leader should have driven around his mistake – inverts where the obligation sits under a blue flag.
The onus in a lapping situation is on the car being lapped to yield space, not on the leader to guess which backmarker might fail to notice him.
Was five seconds enough?
The stewards’ mitigation hinged on visibility, not on the flag-system failure itself: they found Piastri “was not visible” to Sainz through Turns 2 and 3 given the positioning of the cars, and reduced what is normally a 10-second penalty for causing a collision accordingly.
That’s a narrower and more defensible basis than “the system was broken”. The stewards weren’t excusing Sainz’s awareness of the blue flag, they were excusing his awareness of Piastri’s exact position in that instant.
Even so, the substance of the penalty looks light against the consequence.
A five-second time penalty served to a driver running two laps down and finishing 18th has effectively zero cost to Sainz’s afternoon – by his own admission, he “didn’t care” about it.
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By
Pablo Elizalde
Piastri, by contrast, lost the net lead of a Formula 1 race, with Norris going on to win it, even if in the end that didn’t matter because the Australian retired.
Oliver Bearman got the same penalty for ignoring blue flags when being lapped by Isack Hadjar. Then, there was no contact and Hadjar didn’t lose any positions as a result.
When a penalty is not calibrated to the value of what was taken from the other party, it stops functioning as a deterrent for exactly the scenario where deterrence matters most: a backmarker with nothing to lose costing a leader a possible win.
Sainz’s account of a broken warning system is true as far as it goes, and it’s a legitimate grievance about the FIA’s technology that afternoon.
But it doesn’t stretch far enough to cover what the onboard shows and what his own team has confirmed: he had more than one channel of warning that Piastri was coming, and none of them changed what happened at Turn 2.
The stewards weren’t, or shouldn’t have been, working blind – their own explanation states they reviewed in-car camera footage as part of the investigation, the same category of evidence in which those eight blue-light instances are visible.
A visibility-based mitigation for the final seconds before contact is one thing; it sits awkwardly next to half a lap of blue lights that the car’s own camera was recording the whole time.
Pablo has been covering motorsport (mainly F1 and MotoGP) as an editor and writer for over 20 years, having worked for Autosport and Motorsport.com before joining Motor Sport Magazine.
