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George Russell won the Singapore Grand Prix with a dominant drive from pole to flag for Mercedes, but behind him the world championship title fight between McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri reached a flashpoint that has long been threatened. Piastri was furious with his teammate and his team after Norris barged past him at the start and the pair finished third and fourth behind the Red Bull of Max Verstappen.
Russell drove a confident, consummate race for Mercedes, a deserved win, his first in Singapore. Leading from lights out he did not put a foot wrong at the Marina Bay circuit as he delivered his second victory of the year and once more made a strong case for his contract negotiations with the team.
Those wranglings, however, will pale into insignificance compared with the set-to likely to engulf McLaren in the aftermath of this race. They did achieve what they wanted, sealing the constructors’ championship, their second on the trot and the 10th overall, a hugely impressive achievement with six meetings still remaining. Yet Piastri’s and Norris’s fight for the drivers’ title may well have entered a new combative stage, after they clashed at the off.
Russell made a superb start to hold the lead, as did Norris, who burst out of the blocks from fifth and made up two places past Kimi Antonelli and crucially Piastri to claim third. He was uncompromising to elbow past his teammate up the inside through turn three, banged off the Australian in the process as he had to avoid clipping Verstappen in front and took minor damage to his front wing.
Piastri was aggrieved and told his team so, as McLaren were forced to consider how to manage it under their increasingly complex rules of engagement. “Are we cool with Lando just barging me out of the way?” he asked the team. “I mean that wasn’t very team like, but sure …”
Piastri was furious with the team’s response that they would review it afterwards because the contact had occurred as Norris tried to avoid Verstappen. “That is not fair, I am sorry, that’s not fair,” Piastri said. “If he has to avoid another car by crashing into his teammate then that is a pretty shit job of avoiding it.”
This is in part a problem of McLaren’s own making, so scrupulously have they attempted to manage their drivers with a commitment to fairness. They are free to race one another but the team have intervened in their driver management for the purpose of “fairness” over the last two seasons. Most notably at Monza this year, they had Piastri give Norris a place back after he had lost it to his teammate through a slow pit stop. Both drivers have appealed to the team to make decisions at various points expecting them to manage incidents, but this time Piastri felt their procedure was no longer fit for purpose.
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The Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, warned after Monza that setting precedents would make the interpretation of fairness increasingly hard to deal with and clearly Piastri felt this was a case where they should have favoured him and have Norris concede.
On a later radio call with the team, Piastri was still deeply aggrieved as he declined even to engage in a potential strategy debate with his engineer. “You do whatever you think is best,” he said. It was a decidedly disenchanted response from a driver who is usually so calm.
Norris, in contrast, clearly felt it was hard but clean racing and it would likely be viewed as such were it not for McLaren’s previous intercessions creating such a grey area. The Briton will be bullish in his defence at what is likely to be a lively debrief as he took three points from Piastri, who now leads by 22.
What followed on track was somewhat prosaic, as Russell opened a strong lead. Norris began to close fast on Verstappen by lap 13 as the Dutchman’s tyres began to wear but all the while Russell was extending his lead. By lap 20 Norris was within a second and Red Bull pitted Verstappen.
McLaren offered Norris the option to allow Piastri to pit first – to cover off Charles Leclerc – and the British driver rejected it, doubtless with thoughts of Monza still fresh, and he came in on lap 27. Piastri followed a lap later but the stop took five seconds after a problem with the left rear not releasing, which would not have improved his mood although he did emerge still behind his teammate.
With the pit stops played out, Russell led by four seconds from Verstappen, with Norris eight seconds off the lead and with nine seconds on his teammate. They continued in this order as the laps ticked down, with Norris beginning to close on Verstappen.
By lap 53 Norris was within a second of Verstappen but could not quite find a way past and the order remained unchanged as Russell took the flag by five seconds, redemption at last after he crashed out with a shot at the win in 2023.
Antonelli was fifth for Mercedes, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in sixth and seventh for Ferrari, Fernando Alonso eighth for Aston Martin, Oliver Bearman ninth for Haas and Carlos Sainz 10th for Williams. Hamilton is under investigation for repeatedly exceeding track limits when he was struggling with his brakes in the latter stages of the race.
