Sainz-Piastri Contact Turns Hungarian GP into Double Blow
One incident, two lost opportunities
Lando Norris’s victory at the Hungaroring was accompanied by a smaller but consequential story: the contact between Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri while the McLaren driver was attempting to lap the Williams. The incident earned Sainz a five-second penalty and, from Piastri’s perspective, ended any realistic chance of converting his race into a win.
The clash also followed Piastri’s earlier Hungarian GP qualifying frustration, adding another difficult chapter to his weekend. Yet the race itself had already begun to move away from him before the Williams came into the picture.
Sainz: strong pace undone by one moment
Sainz maintained that Williams had produced a far more competitive race than expected. “It’s not going to look like it, but we had a much better race than expected,” he said, explaining that the car had been quick enough to fight the Haas cars and had even run ahead of them at one point.
His explanation for the contact centred on visibility rather than intent. “The incident with Piastri, that could have been avoided with a bit better communication and a bit of bad luck with the dead angle in my mirror,” Sainz said. He added that he did not know Piastri was behind him and had no indication that the McLaren was lapping him.
The stewards still judged the incident worthy of a penalty. Sainz felt the consequences then escalated unnecessarily, pointing to a late pit stop that left him behind Bearman and Alex when he believed Williams should have finished ahead without it.
Despite the result, he separated the incident from his own performance. “Today my race pace was really strong, and I think I’ve been extracting the maximum out of the car,” Sainz said.
Piastri left with no strategic answer
Piastri described a race that had started positively before losing momentum. The opening lap was good, and the first stint was reasonable, but he struggled for pace on the hard tyre. Even then, he felt track position gave him a chance to remain in contention.
After that, however, the race unravelled. “From that point on it’s pretty much everything that could have gone wrong did,” Piastri said. He regarded the collision as an event no strategy could anticipate: “You don’t plan a strategy for getting taken out by a backmarker, so I can’t blame the team at all for that.”
His immediate radio reaction was far less restrained, but his later assessment was focused on recovery. With a gearbox failure eventually ending his race, Piastri said the priority over the break was to reset, find pace and improve.
The contrast was stark: Williams lost a result built on unexpectedly strong pace, while Piastri lost the chance to fight for victory before reliability ended his afternoon completely.
Simone Scanu
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.