Piastri clinches first GP victory after stunning drama with teammate Norris

His response?

Outright speed – aiming to prove who the team’s No.1 driver really is.

Piastri was told over the radio “once you get to Lando, we’ll swap positions”. But that could have been construed as Piastri needing to catch Norris first, and Norris kept extending the margin – from three seconds to nearly six in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

It was clear Piastri wasn’t going to catch his teammate. This was all up to Norris, as the pointed messages headed his way over the radio by McLaren showed.

“The way to win a championship is not by yourself – it’s with the team,” McLaren told Norris as they urged him to relent when he showed no signs of doing so.

“You’re going to need Oscar, and you’re going to need the team. Just remember every single Sunday morning team meeting we have. Lando, you’ve proved your point...”

And Norris did prove his point before he finally relented in the closing stages.

“Thank you very much – thanks for the co-ordination,” Piastri told his team over the radio after he crossed the line for the chequered flag.

“Sorry I made the swap a little harder than it needed to be. First F1 win – thank you very much.”

The incident drew instant comparisons to one of the most awkward moments in F1 history when, at Malaysia’s Sepang in 2013, Sebastian Vettel roared past Australian star Mark Webber, despite being ordered to hold position in P2.

Webber is a long-time mentor of Piastri’s and is now his manager.

But while Vettel disobeyed team orders and showed the kind of ruthlessness that made him a multiple-time world champion, Norris saw the bigger picture this time around – a 1-2 finish for his team as he edged closer in this year’s title race with Verstappen.

After the race, his maturity showed.

“It’s an amazing day for us as a team – that’s the main thing,” Norris told Sky Sports before the podium presentations.

“He got me off the line and controlled the race well. He deserved it today.”

But when former world champion Nico Rosberg, who famously pulled the pin on his top-flight career after proving his own point in beating then-teammate Hamilton to the 2016 title, quizzed Norris on his true feelings about the result, the Brit tellingly said: “The team asked me to do it (to relent), so I did it.”

Piastri maintained his composure, thanking McLaren for wiser heads prevailing.

“It was a bit complicated at the end,” he said. “[But] I put myself in the right position at the start.

“What an amazing feeling to be able to manage a race like that and secure a 1-2.”

And asked how worried he was that Norris wasn’t letting him past, Piastri said openly: “The longer you leave it, the more you get a bit nervous, but it was well executed by the team.”

Speaking to Sky Sports after the presentations, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told Rosberg – whose at-times fractious on-track relationship with Hamilton made constant headlines: “None of us, the team, Lando, Oscar, can go [it] alone. That’s the message, and that’s the message that we discuss on a Sunday morning [prior to a race], and with race drivers – Nico can remind us – you need to refresh this message. That’s why we have these meetings every Sunday and we are extremely pleased our drivers are supporting the trajectory of McLaren.”

Later, Norris explained what happened on the very first corner of the race – the telling moment when he ceded control of his own destiny.

“That’s where I lost my race today,” said the 24-year-old, who has now finished second 12 times in his F1 career and has just one win so far.

“I had a bad shift into second [gear] – my launch [off the start] was fine, my reaction, my launch was good, but I shifted into second and just had a massive cut. It’s something I’ve got to look at.”

When asked by Sky whether the driver with the higher position in the championship should be given preferential treatment during the race, Norris pointedly said: “We’ll see at the end of the year.”

But the drama wasn’t just contained to the inter-McLaren battle.

Verstappen came together with Hamilton on lap 63 – the flashpoint of a frustrating day for the Dutch superstar.

“At the end of the day, if we would have done a better [pit] strategy, you’re not in that position,” Verstappen said after starting third on the grid and finishing fifth after losing out to Hamilton twice through the timing of his pit stops. “I went for a move that was fully on, I don’t think I braked too late, but we got together.”

Verstappen had at-times tense exchanges with his own Red Bull team over the radio, but was unapologetic.

“I don’t think we need to apologise - we just need to do a better job,” he said.

“I don’t know why people think that you cannot be vocal on the [team] radio. This is a sport and if some people don’t like that, then stay home.”

Verstappen leads the world championship standings with 265 points, ahead of Norris (189), Charles Leclerc (162), Carlos Sainz (154) and Piastri (149).

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