Guenther Steiner wants the FIA to stop hiding behind broken software. Speaking on the Red Flags podcast, the former Haas team principal took apart the stewards’ decision to hand Carlos Sainz a five-second penalty rather than the standard 10 seconds for the collision with Oscar Piastri at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

“Don’t try mitigating circumstances. Who cares about mitigating circumstances. It was clearly blue flag and 10 seconds. It’s standard, and he should have gotten that, and nothing would have changed anyway,” Steiner said, in comments reported by GPblog.

The collision happened at Turn 2. Piastri, in the fight for victory, was coming through to lap Sainz when the Williams driver, locked in a battle with Fernando Alonso, failed to yield and made tyre-to-tyre contact with the McLaren.

Piastri kept going but later retired with a gearbox problem. Sainz finished 18th, two laps down. Lando Norris won the race.

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The stewards’ logic

The stewards openly cut the standard 10-second sanction in half for Sainz. Their reasoning: Piastri was in a blind spot as Sainz turned in, and the FIA’s blue-flag warning systems had failed during the race. The steering-wheel lights that normally alert a driver he is about to be lapped were disabled because a GPS malfunction had been throwing up false warnings, and trackside blue panels were not showing the right car numbers.

Onboard footage still showed Sainz passing seven trackside blue-flag panels in the buildup to the contact. Piastri’s radio afterwards was blunt: “Get out of the way, you idiot!”

Sainz apologized and moved on

Sainz did not fight the sanction. The Spaniard said the missing steering-wheel warning had left him blind to what was happening behind.

“We didn’t have blue lights on the steering, which normally, when we are in fights like that one where we are fighting for position, helps us to understand whether we’re getting lapped or not,” he told Formula1.com.

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He accepted the ruling and apologized to Piastri.

“I took the five seconds. I’m okay with it.”

Steiner wants a precedent set

Steiner’s argument goes past the individual call. For him, the FIA should have owned the software failure as its own problem and applied the standard penalty anyway, to keep the message to backmarkers clean. Cutting the sanction in half, he argued, rewards the very thing the blue-flag rule is meant to prevent.

Steiner is chief executive of the Tech3 MotoGP team after leading the takeover in September 2025, but he remains one of the most quoted outside voices on F1 stewarding.

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The debate now moves with F1 to Zandvoort, where the Dutch Grand Prix runs 21-23 August and any repeat flashpoint is likely to be judged against the Hungary call.

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