Oscar Piastri vented his frustration after Lando Norris collided with him on the opening lap of the Singapore Grand Prix, before the Brit overtook his team-mate Formula 1 title rival. And he was even more upset when their McLaren team refused his request to make a team order for them to swap positions back.
Piastri qualified third for the Marina Bay race but did not have the best of opening laps. In contrast, while Norris had only qualified fifth, he got away very well and, by the end of that first lap, had overtaken both Kimi Antonelli and Piastri to move himself into the top three.
But that manoeuvre on Piastri was a controversial one which saw the two McLarens bang wheels before he took the position. The Aussie was unhappy with the way his team-mate had barged his way past and was quick to jump on the radio and ask his team if any intervention was coming.
McLaren initially waited to see what the stewards would do, after the incident was noted by race control. After it was confirmed that there would be no further investigation into what happened, Piastri’s race engineer Tom Stallard came back onto the radio to inform the driver that no team orders were going to be forthcoming.
“No further action from the stewards. As a team, we can see Lando has to avoid Verstappen, so we won’t take any action during the race. We can review further afterwards,” Piastri was told. To which the championship leader responded: “Mate, that’s not fair. I’m sorry, that’s not fair.”
Stallard then replied: “Oscar, we’ll have the opportunity to review together afterwards. Focus on this race, mate. We can still have a good result here.” And then Piastri said: “Yeah, but if he has to avoid another car by crashing into his team-mate, then that’s a pretty s*** job of avoiding.”
Regardless, Norris was not given the order to move aside and so the Brit kept hold of third place. He remained in that position throughout the first stint of the race, just not quite able to get in DRS range of Max Verstappen despite the Dutchman complaining of a gearbox problem which was affecting his downshifts.
George Russell had started on pole and quickly proved that his Mercedes had plenty of race pace to go with its qualifying speed. He quickly sped off into the distance and, by lap 20 – one third of the way through the Grand Prix – he was almost 10 seconds ahead of Verstappen and cruising.