McLaren will hold crisis talks with their warring drivers this week in an attempt to defuse the animosity that lit up the Singapore Grand Prix.
Lando Norris nudged into Oscar Piastri during Sunday night’s race around the harbourside street circuit. The collision on the first lap allowed Norris to finish third, a place ahead of his team-mate, and thus he narrowed his deficit in the world championship standings to 22 points with six rounds remaining.
Piastri was furious, calling the driving ‘s***’.
The Australian asked for their places to be swapped around – a request that was rejected on the pit wall by team principal Andrea Stella, who was flanked by chief executive Zak Brown.
Glasses clinked in the hospitality area afterwards because McLaren had won the constructors’ championship for a second consecutive year, but Stella’s media session was delayed a few minutes – as he weighed up how to handle the fallout.
Brown had a word, sotto voce, in Stella’s ear before his press briefing at the doors of the hospitality gates, while Paul Walsh, 70-year-old former Diageo boss, now executive chairman of McLaren, sipped his champagne close by.
Lando Norris (left) and Oscar Piastri prepare to celebrate winning the constructors’ championship at the Singapore Grand Prix – but relations between the pair are frosty
Norris (centre) nudges into Piastri on the first lap in Singapore after being boxed in by Max Verstappen’s Red Bull
All questions to Stella, posed late at night, focused not on their remarkable title successes but on the fracturing of relations between their two star men.
Just down the paddock, Piastri had just spoken. And everything he said, it seemed, went against what he really meant. He was asked if he thought that McLaren – Woking-based, English spine – were militating against him. ‘No,’ he ventured.
Yet, last month, he and his camp – including manager Mark Webber, the personable yet combative former Williams and Red Bull driver – were fuming at how Piastri had been ordered to cede his position to Norris after the Briton’s slow pit stop in the Italian Grand Prix had spoiled his race.
It was a moment when McLaren’s ‘even-handedness’ went too far. A botched pit stop is part and parcel of racing. Its effects should not be negated by team orders.
So all this surely fed into Piastri’s mind as he was hit by Norris on Sunday. Norris, it should be empashised, did not remotely do it deliberately. It is not his style or in his nature. He tagged the back of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and jumped into the left-hand side of Piastri. It was an error by Norris, but a minor one. A mistake born of racing intent. He saw a space on the inside and pursued it, and who can say he was wrong in the endeavour?
Piastri was fuming, and, equally, it is easy to understand why. His race and championship lead were imperilled.
His resentment relating to Monza was exposed. As was, perhaps, a sense more deeply within him that the management want Norris, a hand-reared project from his teenage years, to prevail as their first world champion since a prodigy called Lewis Hamilton in 2008.
Now to Stella, a decent man, an Italian of seemingly scrupulous moral judgment. He has established ‘Papaya Rules’ by which his duelling pair – the only contenders for the title other than the rampaging Verstappen, 63 points off Piastri with 174 on the table – are conscripted to putting the team first.
The McLaren team celebrate winning the constructors’ championship
McLaren allow their drivers to race free of team instructions. But their ‘Papaya Rules’ have become increasingly fragile
That means nothing dirty. It means no contact between the pair.
In my estimation, Norris is entirely right in his post-race contention that the collision was accidental, a by-product of that judder with Verstappen. So Papaya Rules were not breached.
But they can only preserve harmony so far. Each man is out for himself, not least now the constructors’ title is won at this remarkably early stage.
Stella knows he is holding a grenade. Yet tension among drivers in the same team grappling for a world title is a privilege, and he is aware of that, too.
So what next? Peace talks.
Stella said: ‘The first lap situation is one of those that can happen. It is close racing. We will review it with our drivers and we will have good conversations like we had after Canada (where Norris and Piastri collided, a mistake to which Norris immediately owned up).
‘This review after Canada gave us the opportunity to come back even more united and stronger as a team, and we will do that again. We will take it as a learning experience and see if there is anything we need to fine-tune in terms of our approach.’
Yes, Andrea, but Piastri was furious, asking that Norris move over for him. Has the animosity not boiled up in a way you tried to avoid?
Norris celebrates his podium – but Piastri fears the Brit is considered to be the No1 driver at the team
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella defended Norris after he hit Piastri on the first lap. ‘It is close racing,’ the Italian said. ‘We will review it with our drivers’
‘Oscar made some statements while he was in the car and that is the kind of character we want to have from our drivers,’ reasoned Stella. ‘They have to make their positions very clear. That is what we ask them to do, and at the same time we have to put things into perspective.
‘It is a driver (Piastri) in a Formula One car dealing with the intensity of a first lap who saw Lando moving on to him, but we know that Lando had contact with Verstappen and oversteered into Oscar. We made our assessment, and we decided that the right course of action is the one we took (not swapping them over) but part of the process is the review.’
In fairness to McLaren, both now and historically, they have allowed their drivers to race freely (Monza being one of a couple of anomalies). The philosophy goes back years, to Senna and Prost, Alonso and Hamilton. There were no Papaya Rules then. Are there any remaining today? As the team left Singapore, a 13-hour flight back to London, the fragility of the pact was under threat.
Their new director of communications, a Stella-inspired appointee called Luca Colajanni, formerly of Ferrari, starts work at the team on Wednesday tasked in part with the presentation of intra-team harmony. It is a question he will be asked at 9am that day.
