Norris leans on Piastri as McLaren loosens the leash
McLaren said they’d let their boys race. Lando Norris took that as an invitation to set the tone early in Singapore — a little too early for Oscar Piastri’s liking.
Off the line at Marina Bay, Norris fired himself from P5 into the lead gaggle. Max Verstappen’s move to the right pinched Piastri, Norris jinked left at Turn 3 to avoid the Red Bull, and the orange cars met with a thud. Same garage, different lines — and a very awkward radio exchange.
“That wasn’t very team-like,” Piastri radioed in his usual ice-cold delivery, before the temperature rose a notch. “Are we cool with Lando just barging me out of the way? That’s not fair… If he has to avoid another car by crashing into his teammate, that’s a pretty **** job of avoiding.”
McLaren’s Tom Stallard tried to pour water on it: “We’re looking at it.” The pit wall later parked the debate until after the flag. But the friction was obvious — and it didn’t come out of nowhere.
Only days earlier, Norris had floated exactly this scenario. With McLaren all but home and hosed in the Constructors’, he suggested the team might allow a touch more “leniency” between its two title protagonists. The constructors’ title is the one that pays the bills; with that almost in the box when they arrived in Singapore, Norris reckoned the leash would loosen. “I’m sure there’ll be a small leniency… more and more willing just to say, ‘do whatever’, you know, ‘like kids go have fun’,” he told Sky. Not quite “gloves off,” but close enough.
The problem? The contact arrived on lap one, before anything had actually been clinched. Piastri didn’t find it funny. Nor did Andrea Stella, who now has to keep a championship campaign on track while safeguarding the most delicate resource in Woking: trust.
“We’ll do a very detailed, very analytical review,” Stella said afterwards, careful to underline the “foundational principle” behind McLaren’s stance this season. “We want to protect this ‘let them race’ concept.” Translation: we don’t want to pick winners in orange unless we absolutely have to.
That policy has been pivotal to McLaren’s 2025 resurgence. And it’s why this skirmish matters. When both drivers know the team won’t jump in with a coded “hold position,” they drive with a little more edge — and just occasionally, that edge slices inward.
Norris, for his part, insisted there was nothing malicious in it. He’d been squeezed, he moved, and Piastri was the unlucky collateral. The onboard angles will get scrutinised back at the MTC, but this is really about temperature management, not telemetry. How do you keep two title-contending drivers fast, free and fair when the margins are one car-width and the prize is enormous?
Piastri kept it mature in public, which is his way. “Could things have been better at certain points? Yes,” he said, noting the team’s “well-meaning intentions” and calling it another “tough situation” in a year of them. Read between the lines and you sense the Australian felt this one crossed a line — not a permanent fracture, but a mark he won’t forget.
The context only sharpens it. Piastri leads the Drivers’ Championship by 22 points with six Grands Prix and three Sprints still to run. In a title fight that tight, a lap-one clout from the other side of the garage feels very expensive. Even more so when one of McLaren’s drivers is the hunter and the other is the hunted.
Stella’s challenge now is to calibrate the freedom. “Let them race” works beautifully until it doesn’t. The team missed its first shot at the Constructors’ crown earlier, arrived in Singapore needing a modest haul to finally seal it, and told the drivers to keep it clean while chasing the win. The spirit of that order got muddied within 30 seconds.
None of this means McLaren will suddenly flip to hard team orders. But expect some sharper guidance in the pre-race briefings from here: risk thresholds, corner-one protocols, who owns the inside if both launch well. The kind of quiet frameworks that keep the spectacle alive without inviting the stewards — or the panel beaters.
Make no mistake, this is the best kind of problem: two elite drivers, one dominant car, and a trophy cabinet running out of space. But it’s still a problem. Norris has made it clear he won’t play wingman for free. Piastri, with the points lead and the title scent in his helmet, won’t be bullied. If McLaren can keep the peace without blunting either, they’ll not just win — they’ll make a statement about how you handle success in modern F1.
Singapore was a nudge, not a civil war. But it was also a line in the sand. Norris says he wasn’t aggressive. Piastri clearly thought otherwise. The review will churn through angles and apex speeds, and then the caravan rolls on to the next pressure cooker.
The stakes are obvious now. One more brush in orange could decide who lifts the big trophy at the end. And at this stage of 2025, nobody inside Woking needs a reminder of the cost of friendly fire.
