The Hungarian Grand Prix produced the summer break's angriest argument, and it was not between drivers fighting for the same piece of road. Oscar Piastri was leading the race when the lapped Williams of Carlos Sainz made contact with him at Turn 2 - a collision that cost the McLaren enough time for Lando Norris to jump him at the second round of stops. Piastri later retired with a gearbox failure.
Behind it sat a technical problem. Formula 1's automatic blue flag system malfunctioned around nine laps in, sending erroneous signals to cars that were not being lapped. The Race reported that officials paused the automatic system once the fault was spotted, reverting to manual marshal flags - which meant drivers no longer got the blue light prompt on their steering wheel, and teams carried more of the burden of warning them.
Sainz leaned on exactly that.
"We didn't have blue lights on the steering [wheel] which normally, when we are in fights like that one where we are fighting for position, it helps us to understand whether we're getting lapped or not," Sainz told The Race. "So at this stage, I had no idea I was about to get lapped. On top of that, I was in a big fight with Fernando [Alonso] trying to undercut him into the corner and I wouldn't have expected Oscar to be there."
Asked whether the malfunction should have counted in his favour, he was unapologetic.
"To be honest, I'm really sorry for Oscar but this time I think I have a pretty good excuse for what happened," Sainz said. "I don't know if he could also have been a bit more careful given that he's the one fighting for podiums."
Piastri did not accept a word of it. The Australian, speaking in the media pen and quoted by Motorsport Week's Fleur Rogerson, made clear his radio fury had been aimed at Sainz rather than at his own team's strategy.
"I couldn't believe what happened. Getting crashed into by a lapped car is never one of the things you expect that can go wrong in your race," Piastri said. "I don't really care if he didn't see me. The fact that he didn't and no one told him, or there was a lack of complete awareness, is unacceptable."
He was blunter still about where Sainz's attention had been.
"He was fighting Fernando for last place like it was the world championship. He's quite critical of others. Others have given him some stick before for being frustrating on track," Piastri said. "When you go and do something like that, I think maybe you should look in the mirror a bit."
On the blue flag failure itself, his verdict to ViaPlay was flat: "For me that's no excuse at all, that's got to be one of the dumbest things I've seen in a race track."
The stewards landed somewhere between the two. Sainz was given a five-second time penalty - reduced from ten because officials judged the limited visibility of the blue flags had "reduced the degree of culpability". Sainz, running 18th at the time, was untroubled by it: "I took the five seconds. I'm OK with it. I don't care when I'm fighting for P18."
Piastri was not the only front-runner irritated. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, whose drivers were scrapping over third late on, aimed his complaint at the midfield pit walls rather than the system.
"The marshalling system not functioning and cars in the back defending on Lewis and Kimi's fight is just disgraceful from some of the Teletubbies engineers that sit on the pitwalls of these teams, not telling the drivers what's happening behind," Wolff told DAZN Espana.
Haas driver Ollie Bearman also picked up a five-second penalty for ignoring blue flags, dropping him to 19th in the final classification. Everyone now has three weeks to cool off.
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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/piastri-tells-sainz-to-look-in-the-mirror-after-hungary-clash). Visit for full coverage.*