F1 star blasts FIA with double standards accusation after Singapore Grand Prix shambles

F1 star Carlos Sainz has once again hit out at the FIA, less than a week after angry comments about the farcical start delay at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

The red flag came out midway through the first part of sprint qualifying at the Singapore Grand Prix on Friday for debris on the track, disrupting a number of team's run plans.

Worse than that though, when the session resumed for the final few minutes, drivers found that Overtake Mode had not been reactivated – depriving them of half a second of extra power per lap.

That naturally disadvantaged drivers like Sainz who had been unable to set a lap time before Sergio Perez broke his front wing on the wall, with the Williams man setting the slowest time of anybody to go last on the sprint grid.

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Sainz: We were on the bad end of car issues

An angry Sainz claimed that the FIA 'didn't decide to do sport in equity' when the Overtake Mode issue became apparent (he called it a software issue, but an FIA statement later confirmed that the issue was 'human error'), intimating that the organisation was playing favourites with who they would correct their mistakes for.

It's not immediately clear what Sainz would have had the FIA do to rectify the error, although Sky Sports report that his Williams team petitioned for all 22 cars to be allowed through to SQ2 in light of the issue.

"We had a really poor lap there," he admitted. "We only got one lap, and we had some issues with the brakes in FP1. We had to change them for FP1. We were having some brakes issues still, and yeah, had a few lockups, struggling a lot with with that and with the tyres.

"But on top of that, half of the cars did the the lap with half-a-second quicker engine than the others. There was another software issue with the cars this time around, and we were on the bad end of it.

"And for whatever reason, the FIA, like in Malaysia, didn't decide to do sport in equity, and were happy to do half of the quali with the cars with a higher power than than the other half of the cars, so a bit confused why the sport keeps doing different things depending on who is out in Q1 or who is out in lap one."

He added: "Well, I mean, first of all, we did the whole lap with with a half a second less power than any other lap of the weekend, so that's never gonna help. But with all the issues that we had on the brakes and tyres in that quali, we would have always struggled to get through."

FIA statement on 'human error' in SQ1

"During the first period of sprint qualifying there was a human error in race control unrelated to the timing issue also encountered in SQ1.

"This issue in question meant Overtake Mode was not available after the red flag period during SQ1. When it became apparent that Overtake Mode was not active after the restart, it was then activated for a period of 27 seconds before being deactivated again.

"The FIA acknowledges that this unfortunate human error had an impact on the performance of certain cars based on the timing of their run and their position around the lap. The second and third periods of Sprint Qualifying were not affected."

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