- Hamilton escapes FIA punishment after Miami gesture aimed at Colapinto.
- GT driver Juncadella was fined €5,000 for an identical on-track gesture last year.
- FIA’s silence deepens a growing debate about how it polices driver conduct.
The FIA faces fresh accusations of double standards after Lewis Hamilton avoided punishment for showing his middle finger to Alpine driver Franco Colapinto during the 2026 Miami Grand Prix.
Footage from Hamilton’s onboard camera captured the gesture as the seven-time world champion overtook the Argentine driver. The governing body has not commented or taken any action.
What happened between Hamilton and Colapinto in Miami
The incident took place on the opening lap at Turn 11, where Colapinto ran Hamilton’s Ferrari wide during a fight for sixth place.
Hamilton lost a significant piece of bodywork in the collision. The damage did not end his race but reduced his pace for the rest of the afternoon.
Hamilton passed Colapinto on the approach to Turn 17 shortly after the contact. He raised his middle finger at the Alpine driver as he went by.
The moment was not shown in the live broadcast but surfaced later from onboard footage.
Speaking to media after the race, Hamilton was candid about the damage the collision had caused.
“I was really unlucky to get caught up with Max’s spin and obviously lost positions from there,” he told reporters. “And then I got damaged from Franco, and that lost me a ton of downforce.”
He added that he believed he would have been fighting at the front without the setback and called Miami “a weekend to forget.”
Juncadella accuses FIA of double standards
The footage drew an immediate response from Daniel Juncadella, the Spanish GT driver.
Stewards at the 2025 World Endurance Championship season finale in Bahrain had fined Juncadella €5,000, with €4,000 suspended, for making the exact same gesture.
His target then was BMW driver Augusto Farfus, after a prolonged battle over fifth place in the LMGT3 class. WEC stewards described his behaviour at the time as “rude, disrespectful, and wholly inappropriate in motorsport.”
Juncadella was not willing to stay quiet when he saw Hamilton walk away without consequence. He posted on social media, as reported by PlanetF1.com:
“So I take it there wasn’t a fine, was there? The FIA’s double standards… They never fail.”
When other users argued the gesture was not a serious matter, he pushed back.
“I don’t think it’s right for him to do that,” he wrote. “But slap him with a €2,000 fine, just like they did to me.”
The circumstances in Bahrain were closely parallel to what happened in Miami. Juncadella had just completed a pass on Farfus at Turn 11 when he made the gesture.
He believed Farfus had moved under braking during their battle. Hamilton, too, was gesturing immediately after an overtake on a driver he held responsible for contact.
The similarity between the two incidents is hard to dismiss.
The Verstappen swearing saga and the FIA’s evolving rules
The Hamilton case also connects to a wider controversy that ran through the 2024 season.
At the Singapore Grand Prix, Max Verstappen was ordered to complete community service after using a swear word to describe his car’s performance during a Thursday press conference.
He had told journalists his car had been “f*****.”
Verstappen resisted the punishment and gave only brief, single-word answers at the post-qualifying press conference. He then held his own informal media session outside the official FIA room.
“They want to set a precedent, and people got warnings or a little fine,” he told reporters.
“Now with me, they wanted to set an even bigger example, I guess, which for me is a bit weird because I didn’t swear at anyone particularly.”
The backlash from drivers across the grid pushed the FIA to revise its rules ahead of 2025.
The governing body introduced a distinction between “controlled” settings, such as press conferences, where swearing remains prohibited, and “uncontrolled” settings, such as team radio or on-track moments, where drivers are given more room.
Hamilton’s gesture, made on track in the heat of a race, almost certainly falls under the “uncontrolled” category. That may explain why no action followed.
Why the inconsistency debate is not going away
The “controlled” versus “uncontrolled” distinction may offer a technical answer, but it does not satisfy Juncadella’s central point.
His gesture in Bahrain was also an on-track response to a rival’s driving, made in the moment. WEC stewards still deemed it punishable.
If the same act is penalised in one FIA-sanctioned series and ignored in another, the governing body will struggle to explain the difference in terms that drivers and fans can accept.
The FIA governs Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship and dozens of other competitions under a shared sporting code.
But the gap between how that code is applied in a flagship world championship and how it is applied elsewhere remains visible.
Profile, championship status and camera coverage all appear to influence outcomes, whether the FIA intends them to or not.
Juncadella and Verstappen will share a car at the Nürburgring 24 Hours next weekend. The conversation they might have about the FIA’s conduct policies could prove to be one of the more pointed in the paddock that weekend.
For now, the governing body’s silence on the Hamilton footage answers nothing and leaves open a question it will eventually have to address properly.
