Oscar Piastri loses first flier to ‘unfair’ yellow but nails P3 in Singapore
Oscar Piastri walked into Singapore needing a clean, grown‑up Saturday after the bruises of Baku. He got it — eventually. Third on the grid behind polesitter George Russell and Max Verstappen reads like a reset for the championship leader, but his qualifying almost began with a shrug and a swear over the radio.
Barely into his first push lap in Q1, Piastri had to lift for a yellow after Alex Albon ducked off-line to let the McLaren through at Marina Bay. No contact, no drama — just a caution flag for a car doing the decent thing. “You can’t throw a yellow for someone getting out of the way!” Piastri snapped to race engineer Tom Stallard as his lap evaporated and the tyres lost their edge.
Up in the commentary box, Martin Brundle called it as he saw it. The Sky Sports pundit branded the caution “unfair,” noting that Albon had simply taken to the runoff to be courteous, not because he’d lost control. It’s the sort of grey area that lives in the margins: marshals following procedure to the letter, drivers paying the price for the letter not matching the spirit.
For Piastri, it threatened to be exactly the kind of needle-prick that matters in Singapore. Street circuits punish any delay. Rhythm matters, tyre prep matters, and track evolution can be cruel. He admitted as much later: missing that first lap left him playing catch-up through Q1. But the Australian didn’t let the story stick.
“It didn’t really affect much in the end,” he said in the press conference, tempering the earlier frustration. “It’s just annoying on a street track when you’re trying to build into it. Alex did the best job he could to get out of my way and it ended up costing me a lap. There’s probably still some tweaking to do with the yellow flag side of things.”
There’s a wider conversation brewing here. F1’s tightened up caution protocols in recent seasons — for good reason — but Singapore’s a place where good intentions can get tangled. A car going deep to clear the racing line looks messy from one angle and utterly sensible from another; the marshal’s flag is a binary answer to a question that isn’t. Brundle’s plea for common sense will be echoed in a few team briefings tonight.
What matters to McLaren is that Piastri steadied the day when it could have slipped. After the scruffy weekend in Azerbaijan — wall‑kisses on Saturday and Sunday — and a few too many fumbles of late, he needed a banker. He delivered one with a lap good enough for the second row, splitting the Red Bulls and, crucially, starting ahead of the other papaya car.
Lando Norris, Piastri’s closest pursuer in the title race, will launch from fifth. It’s not catastrophic in Singapore, but it’s also not where you want to be when your team-mate’s up the road and Verstappen sits between you. For all the development arm-wrestling between McLaren and Red Bull this season, it’s the starts and the stint management that could swing Sunday — and Piastri’s P3 gives him options on a circuit that traditionally deals in few.
If there’s a takeaway from qualifying, it’s that Piastri didn’t let the day write him. He shook off an “unfair” yellow, rebuilt his rhythm and put the car where it needed to be. That sounds trivial until you remember the noise around him: a points lead, questions about pressure after Italy and Baku, and a team-mate chiselling away at margins.
Singapore often offers chaos wrapped in humidity and glare. Piastri’s job from here is simple in theory, hard in practice: beat the car in front that matters for the championship, keep the one behind in the mirrors, and don’t give the stewards any reason to glance his way. As he showed on Saturday, the only flags that should decide his race are the ones at the end.
