You know what they say about opinions. Everyone has one.
There’s certainly been no shortage of them since last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, in the aftermath of the latest friction point in McLaren’s application of its internal racing rules.
Oscar Piastri, starting third on the grid, was bumped out of the way and towards the barriers by teammate Lando Norris, who made a fast but haphazard start from fifth. The Briton rear-ended Max Verstappen first, which sent him ricocheting into his teammate.
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The move — and the contact — ensured Norris exited turn 3 in third place ahead of an aggrieved Piastri.
The Australian made his displeasure to the team clear, calling out the move as contrary to the so-called papaya rules that are supposed to govern the way he and his teammate are battling for the championship — the same rules that forced him to hand Norris second place in Italy after the Briton suffered a slow pit stop.
Norris didn’t see it that way, saying no-one serious in Formula 1 would begrudge him attempting that overtake.
McLaren allowed the contact on the grounds Norris had hit Verstappen first and that therefore the brush with Piastri was incidental.
“That’s not fair. I’m sorry, that’s not fair,” Piastri retorted. “If he has to avoid another car by crashing into his teammate, then that’s a pretty shit job of avoiding.”
With the team opting against intervening and with overtaking close to impossible, Norris and Piastri finished in that order, third and fourth, the gap between them coming down by three points, to 22 points.
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It was the third weekend in a row and the fourth from the last five that Piastri has lost points to Norris in the title fight.
More pertinently, it was the third time in the last five rounds that Piastri and his team have fallen on the wrong side of a contentious McLaren call.
There was the alternative strategy granted to Norris in Hungary after his poor qualifying and poorer start that saw him pinch victory from Piastri, who wasn’t given the choice to use that same strategy.
There was the team order in Italy that cost Piastri second place after Norris had a slow stop.
Now there is Singapore, where Norris broke the golden rule — don’t hit your teammate — and wasn’t so much as warned over team radio about it.
For some it was simply too much.
Led by Ralf Schumacher — who’s never short of an opinion — there’s a small but supposedly growing group of people who believe Piastri should now leave McLaren.
It wasn’t just the incident itself in Singapore, which immediately agitated already polarised fans spoiling for a fight.
There was Piastri’s supposed snub of CEO Zak Brown, apparently cutting his radio feed just as the boss was congratulating him on his role in winning the team the constructors championship.
And then there were scenes of McLaren team members, including Brown and principal Andrea Stella, partying on the podium in celebration of the title victory while Piastri languished despondently downstairs.
It’s quite the rap sheet.
It’s also all greatly exaggerated.
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE – OCTOBER 05: Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren and Oscar Piastri of Australia and McLaren celebrate with their team after winning the Constructors Championship.Source: Getty Images
EXHIBIT A: PIASTRI’S TEAM-LIKE RESPONSE TO ‘NOT VERY TEAM-LIKE’ BEHAVIOUR
While the incident itself was certainly contentious, only so much should be read into Piastri’s radio complaints in its immediate aftermath.
In fact McLaren encourages that sort of verbose behaviour.
“That’s the kind of character that we want to have from our drivers,” Stella said in Singapore. “They have to make their position very clear. That’s what we ask them.”
He first made the point at the British Grand Prix earlier this year, when Piastri asked the team whether, if it disagreed with his contentious safety car penalty, he should be swapped back into the lead ahead of Norris.
“We always tell our drivers, ‘Don’t leave anything in the back of your mind. Anything, throw it out. Say what you think’,” he said at the time.
He explained that having the drivers speak openly helped the team to formulate it approach to complex scenarios.
“In this case [in Silverstone], Oscar’s comment was to highlight a situation that we didn’t discuss before,” he said. “We sort of did not discuss that before, and we don’t want to surprise our drivers with situations that we didn’t discuss before.”
By not surprising his drivers, he hopes he can avoid a quiet build-up of bile that might suddenly turn the team toxic.
Piastri’s complaints should be seen in this context — as him being part of the team rather than separating himself from it.
McLaren clash on the way to Constructors | 01:06
EXHIBIT B: THE BOSS SNUB
Social media was taken by storm shortly after the race with the emergence of an on-board video of Piastri’s cooldown lap appearing to show him silently rebuking his CEO.
In the video Piastri is shown pulling into pit lane when Brown’s voice crackles into life over radio.
“Oscar, back-to-back champions,” Brown said. “Good race. Tough race. Thank you —“
Piastri unplugs his steering wheel, appearing to icily sever communication.
Except that’s not what happened.
What was captured was an awkward coincidence of events.
Piastri was told to kill his engine immediately upon parking and then to fully shut down the car five seconds after that.
It meant his radio was switched off before Brown had even started talking.
In any case, even in the social media video Brown’s message is cut off after Piastri removes his steering wheel. The two events are not related.
Brown appearing to get cut off mid-sentence was presumably down to F1 television cutting its own connection to Piastri’s radio link given the car had been switched off.
It had nothing to do with Piastri’s actions. F1’s broadcast team doesn’t access radio from the car end; it can access all radio channels regardless of whether one end has been switched off.
EXHIBIT C: THE CHAMPIONSHIP CELEBRATION
It would be similarly risky to read anything into those compelling pictures of Piastri walking past a television feed showing his team celebrating the constructors championship on the podium.
The reason Piastri remained in the paddock during that time is a messy intersection of regulations and television imperative.
The FIA doesn’t regulate only the race; the events immediately afterwards are also conducted per the rules.
For example, the procedure for a driver who finishes on the podium is highly choreographed: they must park in parc fermé beneath the podium, get weighed, answer interview questions for television, enter the green room, celebrate on the podium and then proceed to the post-race press conference.
Everything from the number of drink bottles to the air conditioner settings are stipulated by the regulations.
Drivers who don’t finish on the podium are mandated to attend the television pen — where broadcast outlets take it on turns to ask questions — and then the written media zone, where print journalists then do the same.
Piastri, therefore, was required by the rules to be in the media pen when Norris was on the podium.
Oscar GRILLS McLaren after Norris clash | 00:58
That meant that when Formula 1 — separate from the FIA — decided to invite the McLaren team onto the podium for an impromptu championship celebration as a TV spectacle, there was simply no way Piastri was able to join his teammates.
In fact several other team members were also caught out by the suddenness of Formula 1’s decision to give McLaren this impromptu podium celebration — the official post-race team photo shows many more people celebrating in front of the garage later in the evening, including Piastri.
WHY WOULD PIASTRI LEAVE?
That doesn’t mean Piastri can’t be disappointed in the way Singapore played out, but it does emphasise that describing that race as grounds for him to consider quitting is ludicrous.
Why, for example, would he contemplate walking out on a team that’s offering him the fastest car on the grid? That’s won two constructors championships on the bounce, the latest at breakneck speed? That’s in the ascendancy and likely to be competing at the front for years to come?
Consider that in the context of some of the teams he’s been linked to.
Ferrari is in such dire form that Charles Leclerc is beginning to sound alarm bells about 2026, with this season on track to be the team’s first winless campaign since 2021.
Red Bull Racing has rebounded from its mid-season woes, but moving there would mean either playing number two to Verstappen or joining a team that Verstappen has quit due to a lack of confidence.
Mercedes, by extension, will have an opening for a lead driver only if it fails to convince Verstappen to join and simultaneously loses George Russell.
The future of Aston Martin’s driver line-up is unclear, but so too is the team’s prospects of success. On paper it’s on the right trajectory, but grands prix aren’t won on a balance sheet.
There would be no other actual or aspiring grandee contenders for his signature.
And while, yes, Mark Webber and rest of Piastri’s management team correctly divined that McLaren, then a lower midfield team, was worth a shot for 2023, they were coming from the lacklustre Alpine team.
Today Piastri is in a position of strength at a powerful and growing team as the championship leader.
While their situations are not entirely alike, Daniel Ricciardo is a sort of cautionary tale here. Ricciardo left established powerhouse — albeit one that had fallen out of championship contention — to move down the grid, to Renault and then to, ironically, McLaren. It was a series of decisions that culminated in the end of his career.
Just because a driver has the capital to play the market doesn’t always mean they should.
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE – OCTOBER 05: The McLaren team celebrate winning the 2025 F1 World Constructors Championship on the podium.Source: Getty Images
ONLY ONE WAY OUT
McLaren could perhaps take it as a compliment that so many people have immediately jumped to the conclusion that great tension exists between team and driver after the controversies of Singapore.
It’s highly unusual for there not to have been a blow up between teammates by this point, and credit must go to McLaren management, in particular team boss Stella, for steering the ship so deep into the season without a mutiny.
Despite the conclusions drawn by some, McLaren’s attempts to keep the title fight fair are genuine, even if they’ve proved contentious.
Stella didn’t shy away from the fact when speaking to media on Sunday in Singapore, when he promised a review into the situation.
“Our review needs to be very detailed, very analytical,” he said. “It needs to take into account the point of view of our two drivers, and then we will form a common opinion.
“We need to be accurate, because there’s a lot at stake, and the lot at stake is not only the championship points but also the trust of our drivers in the way we operate as a team.
“This is, if anything, even more foundational than the points themselves. We will apply all the accuracy that is required in this case and all the conversations that are needed.”
Stella credited the driver for buying into the concept, even if it’s been difficult at times.
“Every time we start our conversations with the drivers, we always remind ourselves, as a premise, that this is hard,” he said.
“They’ve been just great individuals, great contributors, and that’s why it’s been successful so far, and definitely we will work hard to make sure this is true for the remainder of the season and the years ahead in which we will keep on racing with Lando and Oscar.”
Meanwhile, those who see bias based on Norris and McLaren sharing British nationality would do well to remember that McLaren Racing is owned by Bahraini and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds and has an American CEO and Italian team principal — not exactly flag-waving Britons.
And for what it’s worth, Piastri agreed even in the heated aftermath of Singapore that McLaren was doing a generally good job at keeping things fair, even if he retained reservations about the events of that race.
“Could things have been better at certain points? Yes,” he said. “But ultimately it’s a learning process with the whole team.
“I’m very, very happy that the intentions are very well meaning, so I have absolutely no concerns about that.”
All that said, Piastri will leave McLaren eventually, either for another team or to one day retire. No relationship lasts forever.
But this isn’t the time to contemplate it.
A driver doesn’t simply leave a situation like McLaren. That’s not how Formula 1 works.
A driver only quits a team like McLaren if they’re forced to — either because there’s a catastrophic breakdown in their relationship with the team or because they’re so comprehensively beaten by their teammate that their future becomes untenable.
That’s the situation Piastri faces, as does Norris. Realistically there’s no easy exit door.
Supremacy is the only way to secure a place in the team. Defeat — not just this season but subsequently — will leave the other considering their options.
This is a long-term game, and we’re still so far from knowing the winner.