Norris facing ‘consequences’ for Piastri collision

Norris facing ‘consequences’ for Piastri collision

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Lando Norris says he will face “consequences” for his first-lap collision with McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri at the Singapore Grand Prix.

The Briton collided with Piastri at Turn Three in Marina Bay after running into the back of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and damaging his front wing.

Norris went on to finish third with Piastri fourth in the race on 5 October.

Norris – who trails Piastri by 22 points with six races to go, starting at this weekend’s United States Grand Prix – said: “The team held me accountable for what happened, which I think is fair.”

The 25-year-old added: “Then we made progress from there on understanding what the repercussions were for myself, to avoid anything happening worse than what did.”

Norris said: “The last thing I want is something like that to happen. To cause this kind of controversial talks after a race.

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri alongside each other on lap one of the Singapore Grand Prix Reuters

After the collision, Piastri asked on the radio whether the team were “cool with Lando barging me out of the way” but McLaren took no action during the race.

The framework which McLaren set for acceptable conduct when their drivers race with each other is founded on one basic principle – to not crash with your team-mate.

Piastri said the incident was “not how we want to go racing”.

The Australian added: “Lando’s taken responsibility for that and so has the team.”

Norris said: “The simple answer is there was contact between the two cars. And that’s something that we always want to avoid. The rule is to not crash with each other.

“This wasn’t a crash. It was something much smaller. But we still don’t even want to get it to that point. Because it causes these kind of things. And that’s never a good thing.

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Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who is 63 points behind Piastri in the championship but has won two of the past three races and finished second in the other, was asked in a news conference on Thursday in Austin whether he believed McLaren were favouring Norris.

He replied: “Absolutely.”

He laughed, and then said: “Yep.”

Leaving the news conference, he said off-microphone: “Well, there’s a headline.”

BBC Sport sought clarification from Verstappen as to whether he had been joking, and he said through a PR person that he had been.

In answer to the same favouritism question, Verstappen added: “I honestly don’t know. I don’t care also. It has nothing to do with me. They do whatever they think is right and they are doing a very good job of it being so quick.

“For me, the most important thing is we maximise our potential and as long as we do that, it is in our control.”

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Source: BBC

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