McLaren held its nerve on Sunday night in Singapore, choosing not to interfere after Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri clashed on lap one — a call that kept the “let them race” creed intact and left a few raw edges in parc fermé.
Turn 3 was where it got spicy. Norris dived for the inside on Piastri, the rear stepped out, and the two papaya cars thumped wheels. Norris lost a sliver of front wing but none of his momentum; he went on to finish third and hound Max Verstappen in the closing laps. Piastri, less impressed and briefly more vocal, called the move “unfair” over the radio as Norris cleared off. The team said there’d be no swap. He brought it home fourth.
That result still suited the broader McLaren picture. The team wrapped up a second successive Constructors’ Championship, and while Norris trimmed Piastri’s points cushion to 22, both remain the title favourites despite Verstappen’s recent form. There was even a slightly awkward moment as Zak Brown tried to congratulate Piastri over the radio in parc fermé, only for the Australian to appear to cut comms while parking up. Emotions, meet humidity.
Andrea Stella didn’t blink. McLaren’s team principal framed the incident as a test of policy rather than a flashpoint to be policed.
“Winning the Constructors’ and pursuing the Drivers’ Championship, they travel along independent tracks,” Stella said after the flag. “The team’s interest is also to make sure we have fair racing between our two drivers, that they can pursue their aspirations, and that there is sportsmanship in the way we go racing.”
Translation: titles are nice, trust is vital. And trust, at McLaren, is built on drivers sorting it out on track — within reason.
The let-them-race line has been more than PR wallpaper this year. A few weeks back at Monza, Piastri ceded position to Norris after a pit stop blunder shuffled the order and left him ahead late on. That one was neat, tidy and agreed. Singapore wasn’t. This was elbows, carbon, and heat-of-the-moment radio. But the principle, Stella insisted, doesn’t change now that the big trophy is back in Woking’s lobby.
“This race offers a little bit to learn and review, and that’s what we will do,” he said. “Our review needs to be very detailed, very analytical. We need to take into account the point of view of our two drivers… We need to be accurate, because there’s a lot at stake — not only points, but the trust of our drivers in the way we operate as a team.”
Stella bristled at the simplistic “was there a gap?” debate that tends to follow any intra-team tangle. In his view, the nuance matters: corner approach, track position, car states, intentions — all of it. And he knows where the thin ice is. Let the boys race and you accept the risk of bruises. Start calling swaps for every brush and you invite a different kind of trouble.
“Every time we start our conversations with the drivers, we remind ourselves: this is hard,” he added. “When you race together as a team, you can’t have exactly the same interests for the two drivers. We want to protect this ‘let them race’ concept. We know that as soon as you adopt this concept, you face difficulties.”
The difficulty, on Sunday, was obvious. Norris did what front-running drivers do — saw space and put a car in it — and got away with minimal damage and maximum pace. Piastri had every right to be aggrieved in the moment. That the team didn’t step in will be read by some as a green light for more of the same. Inside McLaren, it’s being treated as a necessary stress test.
If there’s a quiet win here for Stella and Brown, it’s that the drama didn’t spill beyond the margins. No finger-pointing on TV. No snipes in the press pen. Piastri kept his powder relatively dry once the adrenaline fell away. Norris, meanwhile, delivered on the pace that’s put him firmly in this title fight.
McLaren has managed a clean internal rivalry all year, which is not an accident and, to date, not fragile. Singapore was the first proper bruise. The review will come, the principle will stay, and the two drivers will be told — again — to go racing hard and clean.
That’s the tightrope at the top. And right now, McLaren seems comfortable on the wire.
