McLaren confirm Norris 'sporting' penalty after controversial collision

An unusual conversation between Sky Sports F1 pundit Ted Kravitz and the two McLaren drivers led to the team getting a little bit cagey at the United States Grand Prix.

McLaren's championship protagonist Lando Norris revealed on Thursday at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) that he was going to face some 'repercussions' from the team regarding his move on Oscar Piastri at the Singapore Grand Prix.

At the Marina Bay Street Circuit, Norris muscled himself in front of Piastri on lap one and up into third in the order, where he would finish with an angered Piastri in fourth.

Piastri took to team radio to state that he felt that Norris had 'barged' him out of the way, and asked his team to be let back through. But, following no further action from FIA race stewards, McLaren opted to keep the order as it was, a decision that Piastri called 'unfair.'

It means that, heading into the sprint weekend at the United States GP, Norris is only 22 points behind Piastri with six race weekends remaining in the season.

Ahead of the action getting underway in Austin, Norris revealed in an interview with Kravitz that he is going to face 'repercussions' from his team in the rest of 2025.

"Of course things got reviewed and yeah, there are and will be repercussions for me until the end of the season," Norris told Sky Sports F1.

"It’s not like I’ve got away with anything, it was also an incident that was small and there was potential to try and avoid it, I can’t afford to make contact and have anything happen like what happened because I put just as much risk on my whole championship from something going wrong as I do on whoever I might be racing against so I’ve got some repercussions for myself but otherwise the engagement and how we go racing is the same as it’s always been."

Later, Kravitz asked Piastri what those repercussions might be, to which the Australian answered: "I can’t say what the repercussions are, it’s for the team to know… let your imagination run wild. Ultimately, he has taken responsibility and there is a form of repercussion for that yes."

Kravitz, keen to get to the bottom of this, pushed further, but was warned by a McLaren staff member that the details were the intellectual property of the team, and thus couldn’t be shared in the interview.

McLaren battle 'explodes' in Austin

With the constructors' championship title wrapped up already for McLaren, it was thought that their drivers would have more freedom to race each other hard for the drivers' title in the remaining six race weekends.

But, there was no inclination of further action regarding the Singapore incident, with Piastri's anger seemingly dissipating post-race when the pair were celebrating the constructors' title victory with their team.

This has reignited the debate, and Sky Sports F1's Karun Chandhok was baffled as to why the team had let their drivers say anything about the behind-the-scenes discussions.

"Why say something like that if you’re not going to tell the full story? All they’ve done is taken a relatively quiet Thursday and it’s just exploded," Chandhok said.

"All of the media have suddenly come running and asked the same question that we are which is, ‘what are the repercussions?’ It just means we’re going to spend all weekend speculating."

McLaren boss Zak Brown said live on Sky Sports F1 during FP1 at COTA that it was in fact a 'sporting' penalty for Norris, but that it was a 'marginal' one due to the fact that it was deemed that his move in Singapore provided a 'marginal' gain for the Brit.

"It's marginal, it's consistent with what happened which was a racing incident at the start of a grand prix with a track that was somewhat damp," Brown said live from the pit wall.

"It wasn't intentional, so very marginal, probably won't be noticed, Lando and Oscar knows what it is which is what's most important.

"Of course we want to be transparent with our fans, we are doing it the hard way trying to let both guys race for the championship, the easy way out would be to have a one and two like some teams do, but that's not how McLaren want to go racing."

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Sam Cook - Digital Journalist

Sam Cook is a talented young sports journalist and social media professional who now specialises in Formula 1, having previously worked as a football journalist and a local news reporter for a variety of different brands.

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