‘Not very team-like’: Piastri fumes after Turn 3 clash with Norris in Singapore
McLaren’s title fight lit up under the Marina Bay lights before the brake discs did. By Turn 3 of lap one, Lando Norris had bounced off Max Verstappen and then into Oscar Piastri, the orange cars clashing in a move that left the championship leader seething on the radio and the stewards unmoved.
Lined up third and fifth, Piastri ahead of Norris on the grid for the Singapore Grand Prix, the McLarens were always going to be in the thick of it alongside Verstappen’s Red Bull. Norris made the better launch and tried to thread the needle behind the Dutchman into Turn 3. As he tagged Verstappen’s rear wheel, his MCL39 stepped into Piastri, who came off worse in the shuffle.
“That wasn’t very team-like,” Piastri said, cool as you like at first. A beat later, the frustration bled through. “So, are we cool with Lando just barging me out of the way? What’s the go there?”
His race engineer, Tom Stallard, tried to calm the waters: “We’re looking at it, let me get back to you.” The stewards eventually declared there was nothing to investigate, and McLaren didn’t intervene on track.
Piastri’s reply had more bite. “If he has to avoid another car by crashing into his teammate, then that’s a pretty **** job of avoiding.”
It was a flashpoint between teammates who’ve been walking a tightrope all season. Piastri arrived as the championship leader, Norris as the form man on Saturdays and often the aggressor on lap one. Put them eyeball-to-eyeball off the line at a street circuit and you’re asking for elbows.
Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle saw it as hard racing rather than heresy. “I thought it was punchy, opportunistic, aggressive, but this is a motor race,” he said on the broadcast. “The ground rules have just been reset there, because Oscar will… and I can’t see how McLaren can swap that around. Why would they? But Oscar will be, ‘so that’s it then, that’s how we go racing’—it’s just changed.”
His point was clear: this wasn’t malicious, it was messy. Norris had already made contact with one car before he touched the other one that mattered most to McLaren. “It’s pretty tight down there,” Brundle added. “Lando actually made contact with two cars doing it.”
None of that makes it any easier in the garage. McLaren have worked hard to keep a lid on hostilities while they chase both titles, but Singapore felt like a line in the sand. You can argue—fairly—that the team set the tone a year ago at Monza, where Piastri muscled past Norris on lap one and the debrief afterward was more shrug than sermon. If that was the benchmark, Singapore was Norris playing by the same rules.
Still, the optics are rough when your own car is the one copping the knock. Piastri’s radio suggested he expected either a swap or, at minimum, acknowledgement that Norris had overstepped. Neither came. The call from the stewards helped McLaren’s case for letting them race; it didn’t do much for the mood on car 81’s side of the garage.
The competitive reality won’t soften it, either. This isn’t a lower-stakes midfield squabble. It’s the two quickest teammates of 2025 trading paint at the start of a race where track position is king. Constructors’ points matter, but so do the scars you carry into the next turn of the championship wheel. As Brundle hinted, “McLaren wants to get the Constructors’ done, then they can worry about squabbling drivers thereafter.” That’s the team view. The driver view is simpler: don’t get shoved.
In truth, Singapore’s Turn 3 is a vortex for exactly this. The corner tightens, the cars compress, and even the best leave with a few fingerprints on their sidepods. But when it’s your teammate doing the shoving—even if he’s been pushed first—every scratch tells a story.
What happens next will be decided behind closed doors at Woking. Expect stern words, a carefully shared party line, and a tacit agreement that the elbows can come out, just not through the McLaren logo. The more interesting bit will come the next time they meet on a lap-one squeeze point with a Red Bull filling the mirrors. Piastri’s message was heard loud and clear. Norris’s, perhaps, even louder: he’s not backing out of a gap, even if it’s papaya on the outside.
If this was the moment the McLaren intra-team title fight truly caught fire, it won’t be the last time we see sparks. The only question now is whether the heat makes them faster—or burns the house down.
