Gasly questions stewards after Norris escapes penalty for Singapore sprint crash

Pierre Gasly stopped short of direct criticism but made his frustration clear after FIA stewards ruled Lando Norris’s collision with Oscar Piastri on the final lap of the Singapore Grand Prix sprint race a racing incident, a verdict that denied the Alpine driver a points finish.

“We’ve got stewards for that. They made up their minds. Whatever the ref says, the ref is right,” Gasly said — the kind of carefully worded dissent more commonly heard from football managers leaving a post-match press conference.

The incident unfolded with the two McLarens running fourth and fifth behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, whose intermediate-compound tyres were visibly degrading. Norris committed to the inside line into Turn 5, but Piastri held his racing line and the cars made contact, spinning Piastri into the barrier. Norris recovered to finish eighth, with Gasly classified ninth — one place outside the points.

The stewards investigated but released their no-further-action bulletin roughly three hours later, during qualifying. Gasly has an obvious stake in the outcome: a penalty for Norris would have promoted him to eighth and earned him a point. He acknowledged as much, but pointed to a contrasting decision from earlier in the same triple-header as evidence of inconsistency.

In Baku, Gasly’s Alpine team-mate Franco Colapinto locked up at the first corner during a safety-car restart and hit Gasly, who in turn collected Norris. The stewards found Colapinto guilty of causing a collision. Because he subsequently retired from the race, what would have been a time penalty was converted into a grid drop for the next event. Subsequent data analysis, however, showed Colapinto had braked only around 3% harder than his usual benchmark at that corner — a detail that complicated the narrative around Alpine team principal Flavio Briatore’s public criticism of the Argentine and his suggestion that internal sanctions could follow.

A separate incident at the same Baku restart added further texture to the debate. Racing Bulls drivers Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad were separated by Esteban Ocon’s Haas when Lindblad attempted to pass both cars and tagged Lawson into a spin, punching a hole in Lawson’s floor. The stewards chose not to penalise Lindblad, citing “the restricted space available” to him and a chain reaction from the incident ahead. Lawson was unconvinced. “Obviously I’m not going to go and protest my team-mate, but… I don’t understand it, because I got hit so hard that it put a hole in my floor,” he said.

The cluster of contested calls across a single triple-header has renewed scrutiny of how the FIA stewards apply consistency when team-mates are involved versus incidents between rival outfits.