Lewis Hamilton has lost his front row starting position for Formula 1’s Hungarian Grand Prix for impeding Oscar Piastri in Q3.

A three-place grid penalty has relegated the seven-time champion to fifth on the grid, while team-mate Charles Leclerc will join poleman Lando Norris on the front row instead.

Hamilton, who had been quickest in Q3 after the first runs, was baffled why Ferrari sent him and Leclerc out for their final Q3 laps earlier than their rivals.

That led to a messy final Q3 lap which wasn’t enough to stop Lando Norris’s McLaren from wrestling pole position off him. "We clearly had the car to be on pole today and I just didn't deliver. So that’s…tough to swallow," Hamilton lamented.

Once that lap was complete, though, Hamilton inadvertently got in the way of Piastri at Turn 1, as the McLaren driver had just started his lap - and had to abort it immediately.

As Hamilton pulled into the pits at the end of his inlap, his race engineer Carlo Santi appeared to suggest he was caught out by Piastri's push lap start coinciding with the yellow flag for Max Verstappen’s spin at the final corner.

“Yeah, I was told literally when he [Piastri] was at the apex behind me,” Hamilton said when The Race asked him about the incident.

“So I had no idea he was coming. I thought everyone came out behind me, I was the first out, so I thought everyone had finished their lap.

“I think Charles was the car that was behind me when I left the pitlane, as far as I was aware.

“So, crazy, because it had been clean [prior to that] and obviously it wasn't intentional.”

When The Race asked Piastri about the incident, he said “it was pretty bad” as he “saw [Hamilton] from the start line and kind of watched him, expecting him to get out of the way".

“I watched him basically all the way up until I nearly hit him. So, a shame.”

The stewards indeed ruled that Piastri was "unnecessarily impeded", and said a three-place penalty follows "the established penalty guidelines for this type of infringement".

The incident was doubly frustrating for Piastri as while Norris showed McLaren had the pace for pole position, Piastri had to settle for fifth place.

But this will now turn to fourth on the grid, and the driver next up in the starting order - Kimi Antonelli - faces an investigation of his own, over how he'd handled yellow flags.

Antonelli claims he had to “coast all the way to the apex” of the final corner and it likely cost him a chance to split the Ferraris.