McLaren’s title-contending drivers have had plenty of minor flashpoints this season, but there’s long been a sense that eventually they’d come together in a big way.
That day was Saturday in Austin. Sort of.
It’s perhaps the most McLaren sort of incident imaginable in that really it was just a largely blameless racing incident, but in the context of their title showdown and the team’s management of the battle, it’s significant.
Oscar Piastri got the better start from third on the grid to run Lando Norris, who started second, side by side into the first turn.
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The Australian was on the outside, however, and to avoid being run off the road, he chose to square off the corner and cut onto the inside line to try to pass Norris down the inside.
He didn’t see Nico Hülkenberg at his rear-left corner.
Hülkenberg was having his own battle on the apex, with Fernando Alonso on his inside. It meant he had nowhere to go as Piastri took his preferred line.
Heavy contact was the result.
Piastri’s McLaren was lifted into the air and skittled into Norris, wiping both out on the spot. Hülkenberg and two other cars picked up damage, and so much debris was strewn across the track that a five-lap safety car was required before the race could be restarted.
The stewards ruled the entire sorry but entirely predictable mess a racing incident, with no investigations opened into any driver.
It’s not exactly the red-blooded, adrenaline-fuelled crash characteristic of most teammate title battles, but for McLaren it was cataclysmic — at least you’d say as much judging by the reaction of management after the sprint.
And with Norris comfortably defeated by Verstappen in grand prix qualifying and Piastri slumping to sixth, it’s set the tone or another complicated weekend for the constructors championship-winning team.
McLAREN LASHES OUT AFTER SPRINT-ENDING CRASH
“That was terrible,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown told Sky Sports. “Neither of our drivers to blame there.
“Some amateur-hour driving by some drivers up there at the front whacked out two guys.
“Clearly Nico Hulkenberg drove into Oscar, and he had no business being where he was.“
It was a remarkable rebuke from a senior management figure for what was really a racing incident. Hülkenberg and Alonso — he said ‘drivers’ and presumably was directing his ire to the Aston Martin driver too — had as much right to be at the first corner as Piastri given their lofty qualifying positions.
Brown was speaking while the sprint was still running, so perhaps he can be excused on the grounds that the adrenaline was still pumping.
The usually supercool team principal Andrea Stella, however, doubled down in post-sprint comments.
“It’s surprising that some drivers with a lot of experience don’t act with just more prudence,” he told Sky Sports.
“Just more prudence — go through the first corner, make sure you don’t damage competitors and then carry on.”
Of course Stella and Brown’s job is to protect their drivers. In light of a double DNF, they were never likely to play it totally cool.
But lashing out against rival drivers racing for position as bring imprudent is at the far other end of the spectrum.
Most uncomfortable is the implication that the McLaren drivers have some sort of right to extra space relative to
Further, the idea that the McLaren drivers should have a particular right to extra space at the first turn — particularly given Piastri’s actions precipitated the move, even if he wasn’t at fault per se — wasn’t exactly gracious.
“I don’t talk about malintent,” Stella insisted. “I just talk about prudence — prudence, especially when you are in such a position which was very good for some of these experienced drivers.
“I think a little bit more prudence would have been good for everyone.”
The idea that Hülkenberg and Alonso were somehow fortunate to be so high up the grid — they qualified that high — does nothing to lessen the impact of the comments.
Hours later, with both cars repaired in time for qualifying, Brown walked back his comments.
“I don’t think it’s on Nico,” he said, admitting to responding badly in the heat of the moment.
We often talk about drivers feeling the pressure and whether it affects their judgement in the heat of battle.
With Verstappen taking another eight points out of Piastri’s lead and with his Red Bull Racing car looking at home around the Circuit of the Americas, is it Brown and Stella who are feeling the pressure of what was previously an all-but-guaranteed drivers title slowly edging towards becoming a genuine three-way contest — and with McLaren being apparently powerless to recapture the momentum?
WILL THERE BE CONSEQUENCES?
Of course this had to happen just one round after Piastri and Norris’s first-lap clash in Singapore.
It’s even more ironically timed given the talk in the lead-up to his weekend’s grand prix dominated by McLaren deciding in the intervening days that, yes, Norris was more to blame and would suffer undisclosed sporting “repercussions” as a result.
It was almost instant that some were calling for Piastri to suffer the same unexplained consequences or at least be publicly blamed for the incident.
The two cases are subtly different.
In Singapore Norris overcooked turn 3, hit Verstappen and then rebounded in Piastri, who was giving him plenty of space to race. It was clumsy and ill-judged, but the team considered the contact between its cars to be incidental after the original collision with the leading Dutchman.
This weekend Piastri was in control of his switch to the inside of Norris when he and Hülkenberg collided, with the Sauber catapulting him into Norris.
In both cases the stewards saw no reason to intervene.
But — and it’s a significant but in the context of McLaren’s sprawling papaya rules — the friendly fire was precipitated by Piastri’s dive down the inside, regardless of how much McLaren management wants to question the imprudence of others.
He didn’t cause a crash in the regulatory sense of the word, but he was the driver in that top group who changed lines, putting himself in a position to be hit at what is historically a high-risk corner. He should have been aware of that risk. Maybe he was and took it anyway given the low points yield of the sprint.
So if Norris was dished out with some sort of sporting penalty, should Piastri as well given he had a role, even if it’s a minor one, in the incident? If Norris is yet to serve said penalty, is the score effectively settled?
Is it different because both drivers were taken out of the sprint and therefore the points effect is neutral? Or does Norris missing out on a chance to take points out of his title deficit count for something?
If these were any other drivers in any other team, these questions would be frivolous, but McLaren’s intent on keeping the playing field level — a noble aim but an increasingly complicated one — means all these questions must be contemplated.
There is one other key difference, however.
Whereas Piastri argued clearly in Singapore about the fairness of Norris’s move based on the precedent, Norris saw no such issue with the incident.
“He got hit, no?” Norris told Sky Sport Italy. “He got hit, right? So why is it his fault?
“Oscar got hit, it can’t be his fault.”
McLaren management would have been thankful to hear it. After almost two weeks of talk about the way the team is micromanaging the title right, Norris’s lack of interest in arguing the toss might avoid a repeat.
But this surely won’t be the last time fairness is brought up as the championship heads towards a crunch.
PIASTRI QUALIFYING COMPOUNDS WOE
If the sprint crash was a portent for anyone, it was for Piastri, whose weekend has yet to really click.
While he shrank his deficit to Norris from sprint qualifying — down from 0.309 seconds to 0.283 seconds — that margin was still large enough for three cars to sneak into the gap for the grand prix.
Piastri will start sixth on the grid, his second lowest starting position since crashing out of qualifying in Azerbaijan. Baku was also the only other time this season Piastri had qualified off the front two rows.
Compounding the underwhelming day was that this was Piastri’s most significant qualifying defeat to Norris so far this season. He’d never qualified more than two places behind his teammate before today — he’ll start four places back in the race. Though he was outqualified by a bigger margin in Austria — there the gap was 0.583 seconds — at the Red Bull Ring he didn’t get a chance to complete his final lap owing to yellow flags, artificially inflating the gap.
“Just tricky session,” he said. “I didn’t really feel terribly comfortable out there. I think the lap time shows it.
“It just [felt] a little bit unpredictable. I think it was very tight for the positions ahead of me, so I think compared to yesterday it didn’t feel quite as comfortable or as quick. Some things to try and look at and see why it was so tough.
“But still, a long race tomorrow and a lot can happen, so we’ll try and make up some ground there.”
It’s worth nothing that Circuit of the Americas has never been a Piastri track. In his two past visits to Austin he’s been comfortably beaten by his teammate.
In 2023 he was beaten in qualifying by 0.255 seconds. In the sprint he was beaten by six places and he retired from the grad prix.
In 2024 the sprint qualifying margin was 0.962 seconds and 12 places, and he finished the short race seven places back.
Qualifying for the grand prix went only a little better, with the margin reduced to 0.62 seconds and four places, and he finished the race only one place behind Norris.
In that light this year’s qualifying result looks like progress, though he’s unlikely to feel that way.
VERSTAPPEN POISED FOR ANOTHER POINTS SWING
If there’s any consolation for Piastri, it’s that Norris couldn’t take pole — by the Briton’s own admission, he never stood a chance.
This is the fourth race in a row that McLaren hasn’t taken pole. While 0.291 seconds isn’t its biggest qualifying defeat of the year, it’s second only to Azerbaijan, where the red flags and changeable weather helped Verstappen skip off to an even bigger pole by almost half a second.
But then again, if Verstappen had been released from pit lane early enough to complete his second flying lap, the margin might have got close to that.
Instead, what could have been an embarrassing error from Red Bull Racing turned into a chastening defeat of McLaren.
It gets worse for McLaren too.
Having not run in the sprint race means the team had no real long-run data with which to set up the car for the grand prix. Whereas Verstappen has been able to tweak his car based on what he felt in the sprint, McLaren is effectively going off its gut instinct following the sole hour of practice, half of which was targeted at qualifying performance.
“I think [that will cost us] quite a bit, honestly.” Norris said, “I don’t think I’ve done more than three laps in a row and not with more than 40 kilos of fuel.
“We don’t know if it’s going to be amazing or terrible.
“Certainly around here because it’s so difficult with the bumps, with the bottoming, with the wind, it’s unpredictable, so we were hoping to learn a lot this morning in the sprint in terms of how the car set-up was going to be from quali to race and how it changes and the things that are good and bad and then hopefully make tweaks for this quali for the race tomorrow.
“Obviously that didn’t go to plan. We’re certainly on the back foot.”
It left Norris feeling less than optimistic about his race.
“I think every single lap we did today was between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds off of Max,” he said. “To turn that around completely tomorrow I think is going to be pretty difficult.”
Worse again is that temperatures on Sunday will be much cooler, which could reduce McLaren’s tyre life advantage and make it harder to make up ground.
If the drivers finish where they start, Verstappen will take another 17 points out of Piastri’s lead, shrinking his gap to 38 points. Norris will reduce his margin to 13 points.
“Today [in the sprint] it was perfect for me to get those points,” Verstappen said. “It brings me a bit closer for sure, which I think is nice for everyone — maybe not for them, but in general for everyone.”
There’s a long race still to come tomorrow, but it’s starting to feel like a three-way title fight.
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