The blue flag is well-established in Motorsport, telling a slower car that the leaders are approaching, and you have three posts before you risk a penalty, compounding an already bad day into something worse.

The final race before the summer break saw the backmarkers get involved with the battles at the front and there is no way that is normally positive.

The Hungaroring is seen as the equivalent of a karting track, swinging the F1 calendar from big open sites at Silverstone and Spa to tight and twisty, throwing these machines into every bend and maybe one or two overtaking spots across the lap, with the rest of its 2.7 miles spent recharging a battery.

The lack of overtaking spots extends to negotiating past those lagging cars. In theory, the leaders approach and the steady drumbeat of blue becomes more urgent with the backmarker getting out of the way within three warnings. The punishment for doing it is a penalty, which makes it oddly pointless. Your day is already ruined, what’s another 10 seconds?

In Hungary, this didn’t really happen like it should. Let’s look at a couple of these incidents. Max Verstappen approached the fighting VCARBs, calling them morons as Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad were fighting it out late in the race.

In other Red Bull news. Ollie Bearman earned himself a five-second penalty after not getting out of Isack Hadjar’s way.

But the most major incident happened between Carlos Sainz and Oscar Piastri while Sainz was fighting his countryman Fernando Alonso. We firstly found out just what it is that would make the normally exceptionally chilled out Australian shout on the team radio, and then go after the Williams driver in the media pen after the race. Piastri was looking for his first Grand Prix victory since Zandvoort 2025, and was looking in good form as he attempted to save his faltering season.

Piastri eventually had to retire, fading further into insignificance as Lando Norris picked up his first victory of 2026 as the summer break throws up more questions than answers ahead of the flyaway races.

Formula 1 in 2026 has seemingly stripped away a layer of veneer from the glitz and ceremony the sport shows to reveal layers of padding and material that creates a different picture. From unpopular power regulations, to resurfacing tracks mid-race to broadcast changes that remove decimal points to safety car finishes… the formula itself is starting to look a little unpalatable, and without changes (and a better presentation of those changes), the sport that became unmissable is at risk of becoming unwatchable.

Like with Monaco and a mistake in the timing system that meant several drivers got hit by 60.1kmph pitlane speeding penalties, this time there was a failure in the blue flag system, with Bearman saying he was getting false notifications after a handful of laps.

The backmarkers should not be making the headlines from a Grand Prix. Also-rans, as cruel as it sounds, are exactly that, a footnote in a race result, unable to influence the result from the front, they should be seen and not heard, as it were. Silverstone a good example of that, but not the fault of anyone on the track.

The safety car blue flag rules say that once everything is sorted, lapped runners may overtake the pack and rejoin the back to get back to the lead lap and establish race order. Why are we doing this? How about dropping them back through the field instead, solving the issue of losing laps to accommodate runners out of contention. Make the runners drop back, or make lapped runners go through the pit lane to given them some distance. Just something that saves one or two laps and means that we don’t risk a finish under a safety car. The other easy way to do this would have simply been a red flag and have a 2-3 lap shootout to settle the race weekend.

So how to improve the blue flag situation? The easiest thing to do would be to get rid of them. Remove the flags completely and make the faster car get past the slower one. But this does not always work on circuits where overtaking is a mission, even if you’re in a rocketship going past someone working out their dinner reservation that evening.

If there’s a technical issue, the engineers should be letting their drivers know. Toto Wolff had some choice words about some of them.

IndyCar is probably the gold standard here. The first blue flag the slower driver sees is advisory. If you are about to go a lap down, the faster driver gets no special privilege. After all, being a lap down in Indy isn’t always a death sentence. But being more than a lap down means the blue flags become mandatory. Disable the slower driver’s straight and overtake modes until they’ve moved. Get out of the way or get a penalty.

And as we said earlier, ignoring a mandatory blue gets you a penalty, but it’s no good in a race you’ve already squandered. The penalty for ignoring a mandatory blue should be a grid penalty that carries over to the next race weekend. Throw in a couple of superlicense points and there is much more jeopardy involved. A sporting sanction with teeth is the way forward.

The formula can be compelling. Hungary was a fun battle of strategy, and a repeat of Papaya Rules being open to debate, and we should be talking about Kimi Antonelli’s lead, or George Russell fighting his way back from anti-stall to seventh, or Isack Hadjar’s seventh consecutive top six finish in a row, but instead we’re talking about Carlos Sainz, who finished 18th in Hungary.

F1 caters for all 22 drivers. Fans want to hear from everyone, no matter where they finished. People want to watch the midfield fight it out for 14th, but this shouldn’t be the headline. Not for the first time this season, the sport itself has become the story, and when that happens, it takes the oxygen away from the people who make the sport what it is. The drivers need to be given the best possible formula to shine. That can’t happen if the basics aren’t happening.

All the headlines in 2026 are video game references.

NPC = Non-player characters. Essentially, an extra character designed to add texture to a created world.

This was what passed for a meme before we had the internet.