Carlos Sainz took a five-second penalty at the Hungarian Grand Prix for a collision with Oscar Piastri that cost the McLaren driver the lead. The stewards treated it as a driving standards matter. Almost nobody else has.
The incident happened while Piastri was trying to lap Sainz and Fernando Alonso, with the FIA's automatic blue flag light system malfunctioning. What it has reopened is a bigger question: are F1's blue flag rules themselves set too aggressively?
The regulations are prescriptive. The FIA's International Sporting Code requires a lapped driver to move aside at "the first available opportunity". Teams get a pre-warning once the faster car is within three seconds; at 1.2 seconds, blue light panels are displayed to the slower car, plus blue cockpit lights on the steering wheel - when the system works, which in Budapest it didn't. In practice, "first available opportunity" means about three marshal posts.
Conor Daly, who races in IndyCar where lapped drivers fight hard to stay on the lead lap in case a caution brings them back into contention, argued on The Race F1 Podcast that F1 has drifted too far towards the leader's convenience without being able to abandon the concept.
"I don't think you can eliminate it, but I do think that you can't expect everyone to give up," Daly said. "You can't eliminate the blue flags because you do want to see the best battle possible for the win. But you can't expect people to not want to race."
He was honest about the contradiction in his own position, having been on both ends of it. "I can't picture racing without [blue flags] because certainly if I'm in the lead, I don't want to have to deal with any of that," he said. "I don't want to have to deal with any lapped traffic. I want them to get out of the way as soon as possible."
Daly's fix is a longer fuse rather than an abolition - give the backmarker a lap before the enforcement bites. "I do think that three marshals posts can come by very fast. [Maybe better if it's] 'hey, if you don't get by him in a lap, we're going to start getting very aggressive with this blue flag'."
And he pushed back on the idea that the leader deserves an entirely clear road. "If the leader can't get by in one lap within two seconds, I mean, the leader's got more problems than that."
The Race's Glenn Freeman went further, framing the current rules as an overcorrection driven by years of complaints from the front of the grid.
"F1 has just maybe gone too far, like you have to get out of the way too quickly now," Freeman said. "Three blue flags... I wonder if that's a bit too much. But obviously, like most things in F1, it's become more prescribed because people complained about the way it was before."
His point is that something was lost in the tidying-up. "[Before] the blue flag was just kind of advising you that a faster car is behind. That's why some drivers became almost famous for being a bit rubbish at getting out of the way. There was an art form to making your way through traffic. Now there isn't really."
Freeman's description of what a backmarker's race now looks like is the sharpest criticism of the system: "You see a handful of blue flags, you basically have to give up, let the leader by. Then you've kind of got to hope that someone else in front of you has to give up to let the leader by so you can get back on with your race."
Williams team principal James Vowles approaches it from a different direction entirely. He is not arguing the rules are too strict - he is arguing the system underneath them failed, and that the order of concession was the actual problem. Vowles pointed out that Alonso, not Sainz, was first in line to let Piastri through.
"Fernando had a number of blue flashing lights all the way through and in fact remained in position in front of Oscar," Vowles said in a video released by the team. "You have to do it in order, so Fernando should have conceded that position earlier. What happened is, he didn't."
Alonso then passed Sainz at turn one, which flipped which car counted as the one behind, twice, in the space of two corners. "What complicated it is fundamentally without the automatic system, cars were staying in place for perhaps longer than they should have done," Vowles said. "Second to that, you have to know which one is exactly the car behind at the right moment."
He accepted Williams's share. "Now what we did do is communicate to Carlos into turn one that Oscar was coming. What we should have done, because ultimately we're still racing for a non-point scoring position, is indicate to Carlos that that was happening at the point where he was alongside Fernando on the run down to turn two. So that's what I mean by it's our culpability. But it wasn't an attempt to go and block Oscar."
His ask of the FIA is procedural rather than philosophical. "We need to make sure that as FIA systems do fail - and they will fail from time to time - we have a slightly better mechanism in place."
The stewards, for their part, did not investigate Alonso's response to the blue flags and did not factor the signalling failure into their decision, though they did accept Sainz's poor visibility of Piastri as mitigation. That gap - between a rule enforced strictly on one driver and a system that had stopped telling drivers who to move for - is why the argument has outlasted the race by a week.
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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/are-f1s-blue-flags-too-extreme-daly-and-vowles-disagree). Visit for full coverage.*