Alpine's Pierre Gasly has rightly raised an eyebrow at the FIA stewards' decision not to penalise Lando Norris after a chaotic final-lap clash in Singapore, as Motorsport.com reports. When Norris tangled with McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri while fighting for position, the resulting contact sent Piastri spinning straight into the barrier. Norris managed to limp home in eighth place, just ahead of Gasly.
Naturally, the decision left Gasly feeling aggrieved, and for good reason: he would have inherited a championship point if Norris had faced a penalty. "I would have scored a point if Lando would have been penalised," Gasly stated candidly. Speaking on the stewards' verdict, he offered the classic football-manager translation: "We've got stewards for that. They made up their minds. Whatever the ref says, the ref is right."
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.
After a three-hour wait during qualifying, the stewards ultimately deemed the incident a racing incident, noting in their official bulletin that neither driver was predominantly to blame. According to the document, Oscar Piastri admitted he did not expect the lunge, while Lando Norris argued his front axle was far enough alongside at the apex to warrant racing room before running out of asphalt on the inside kerb.
For Gasly, the leniency felt particularly sharp given recent history. Earlier in the triple-header at Baku, Alpine team-mate Franco Colapinto was hit with a grid penalty for a restart collision that collected Gasly and ruined both Alpine machines' points finishes. Though Alpine boss Flavio Briatore initially raged at Colapinto with talk of internal sanctions, telemetry later revealed the Argentine had only braked roughly 3% harder than normal.
Further down the grid in Baku, another intra-team tangle went completely unpunished. Racing Bulls driver Arvid Lindblad caught team-mate Liam Lawson in a sandwich during a safety car restart alongside Esteban Ocon's Haas, leaving a gaping hole in Lawson's floor. The stewards absolved Lindblad, citing restricted space and a chain reaction, leaving a visibly frustrated Lawson to remark, "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."
Gasly isn't about to start a campaign against fellow drivers, but he clearly sees a wider puzzle in how consistency is applied. "You should not really crash in your teammate. I'm not going to go down that route, I don't know," Gasly added. "It's another two collisions between teammates. There's no further investigation. I'm sure we'll discuss that with the stewards."
