Williams radio outage shows Oscar Piastri owes Carlos Sainz an apology after Hungary spat

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Oscar Piastri blasted Carlos Sainz after they made contact during the Hungarian Grand Prix. He felt he had no excuse for the incident, but his Williams radio says otherwise.

On lap 39, Piastri was battling for the lead of the Hungarian Grand Prix when he encountered Sainz fighting with Fernando Alonso. The Williams driver was shown blue flags, but these were ignored, and the two collided on the approach to turn three.

It was discovered that there was a problem with the blue flags system, with panels constantly flashing until the manual system was used during the race. Sainz was hit with a five-second penalty as opposed to a 10, as the FIA accepted he had ‘limited visibility’ at that point of the circuit.

Williams’ radio outage meant Carlos Sainz was not told about Oscar Piastri before Hungarian GP contact

Sainz had ‘no idea’ Piastri was behind him due to the error with the blue flags. But Piastri was not having any of his excuses, saying that his move was ‘one of the dumbest things’ he had seen on a race track.

Piastri later retired from the race with a gearbox failure. The McLaren driver was absolutely furious with Sainz and was unwilling to accept any explanation, but as it turns out, the Spaniard has a very good excuse.

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The blue flags system was confusing for all drivers, with even Lando Norris and Kimi Antonelli receiving blue flags despite leading the race. Many may argue that Sainz should have been aware of his track position and Williams should have told him about Piastri – the thing is, they did, or tried to.

Sainz’s radio during the incident reveals that his race engineer, Gaetan Jego, informs him that Piastri was 15 seconds behind him and that the automatic blue flags system was disabled. However, this message had poor quality.

When Sainz asked Jego to repeat the message, as he could not understand it, he was only informed about the blue flags, not about where Piastri was.

Subsequently, he really did have no way of knowing where the McLaren driver was, and given that the blue flags system had failed, he would have been under the impression that he was free to fight Alonso and not worry about the leaders behind.

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Sainz said about his penalty over the radio: “The penalty was given to Piastri, yes… but was it for obstruction or for the crash?”Jego responded: “It was just the contact when you were battling with Alonso – it was just in your blind spot on the rear left-hand side… he didn’t retire because of that; he retired due to power unit problems, I think.”

Team principal James Vowles then admitted that Williams’ communication was not good enough: “Carlos, well done… we should have done a better job with communication.”

The blue flags system’s failure, combined with poor comms on Williams’ end, proves that Sainz had good excuses for the incident. He was given mixed signals about whether to move out of the way for frontrunners, and when he was told about Piastri, it was not relayed properly.

As frustrated as Piastri will be over the ordeal, he has to give Sainz an apology. It was ultimately a combination of F1 and Williams letting the Spaniard down, rather than it being his own individual error.