Singapore GP start ignites McLaren friction as Oscar Piastri protests lack of team orders

A combative start in Singapore saw Lando Norris surge from fifth to third and ignite tensions with Oscar Piastri

A punchy start to the Singapore Grand Prix, which saw Lando Norris leap from fifth to third, led to friction between the two McLaren drivers as the drivers' championship battle heats up.

Piastri, who started third and was quickly overtaken by his team-mate in a lunging move, was clearly annoyed when the Woking outfit decided not to impose any team orders. As Norris went for the overtake, he clipped the back of Max Verstappen into Turn 3, which in turn led to him banging wheels with Piastri, who was on the outside.

"Yeah. I mean, that wasn't very team-like like but sure..."

"So are we cool with Lando just barging me out of the way or? What’s the go there?" Piastri said to his race engineer, Tom Stallard, who responded: "We’re looking at it. Let me get back to you."

The incident was noted by the stewards, who later determined that no further action was required. McLaren agreed.

"No further action from the stewards," Stallard reported to Piastri. "As a team, we can see Lando had to avoid Verstappen, so we won't take any action during the race. We can review further afterwards."

An unhappy Piastri quipped, "That's not fair. I'm sorry, that's not fair. If he has to avoid another car by crashing into his team-mate, then that's a pretty **** job of avoiding."

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

"Control the controllables, mate," Stallard added.

All the while, Norris continued to extend the gap over his team-mate.

Going into the race at the Marina Bay Street Circuit, Norris sat 25 points behind the current championship leader, Piastri. McLaren has maintained its position of allowing the drivers to fight it out between themselves for the drivers' championship title.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown explained, following the race, after the team clinched the constructors' championship title: "They have driven brilliantly all season. You can't win the constructors' without two awesome racing drivers. As you can see, we are letting them race. That was a bit more of a nail-biter there, but they race hard, they race clean, they race to win. A lot of racing to go and hopefully a lot more victories for both of them."

"We've got to keep doing what we're doing," Brown explained to Bloomberg after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. "The constructors' is looking very good; we had a chance to wrap it up in Baku, but let's not talk about Baku. Hopefully, we can get the job done in Singapore.

"And what we want to do is we want our two drivers, and Max, but we'd like to kind of get him out of there, to fight for the championship and just give them equal opportunity, equal equipment, which is what we're doing and may the best man win. That's what we wanna do.

"We'd like to not play a role if at all possible, but you get into, you know, Lando had a mechanical issue and things can happen in safety cars and things of that nature, but I think our goal is to just set Lando and Oscar up to be competing for the championship down to Abu Dhabi and may the best driver win."