Sky Sports F1 pundit Jenson Button believes that the Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri incident during the Singapore Grand Prix was nothing but hard racing from Norris.
During the first lap of the race, Norris went up the inside on Piastri. The move resulted in Norris making minor contact with Max Verstappen’s front wing and then engaging in wheel-to-wheel contact with Piastri.
As a result, Piastri had to back off and avoid further contact with the wall, allowing Norris to stay ahead and Piastri to run right behind.
Norris qualified in fourth place, but the move earned him a spot, and he finished the race in third place, the exact spot where he started.
After the move, Piastri requested that the positions be swapped, claiming he had been forced to let Norris through. The team did not oblige, and Piastri’s championship rival finished ahead.
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McLaren has drawn considerable criticism over its rules regarding teammates fighting during the race, with drivers having their positions swapped due to pit stops or prior race incidents.
Button, however, does not believe this incident and the contact merited an action from the team.
“It’s racing. He’s side by side. He had the little tap into the back of the Red Bull of Max. And he’s got a bit of oversteer, which is quite unusual. I think it just shows how low the grip was. He didn’t purposefully try to push him in the wall,” Button said on the Sky Sports F1 broadcast after the race.
“It’s not like he drove him into the wall. It’s not like he drove all the way to the wall hoping that Oscar would hit the wall or disappear. It was halfway through the corner, he had a snap of oversteer.
“If I was Oscar, I would be like, ‘ah, my team-mate got the better of me there!’ And that’s it.”
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At the Italian Grand Prix, Piastri was forced to give Norris a position due to the British driver suffering from a slow pit stop. McLaren calculated that the slow stop caused Norris to get behind Piastri and requested the No. 81 driver to give up the spot.
McLaren is facing a critical juncture in their racing rules, as making decisions that they believe are fair or clean often end up causing team turmoil, the exact thing the rules are trying to prevent.