Zak Brown warns Norris and Piastri after Singapore crash: 'That's an order'

On the final lap of the Singapore Sprint, Norris tried to overtake Piastri into Turn 5. The gap quickly closed, and the two drivers collided. Piastri ended up in the wall, while Norris recovered to finish in eighth place.

Brown spoke to Martin Brundle ahead of Sunday's Grand Prix at the Marina Bay Street Circuit. The former driver told the McLaren CEO: "I'm going to imagine some fairly stern words last night to your drivers who managed to trip over each other."

Brown answered: "Oh yeah. That was a ‘don’t do that again.’ And we didn’t say please. That’s an order."

The American continued: "Yeah. You can’t have that [crash]. It was an unnecessary result for the team when a lot of pressure is on, and we’re trying to catch Ferrari and Red Bull’s not far behind.

"We learn from it. I think there’s some things they definitely could have done differently. Maybe a few things we could have done a little bit differently. So you learn," he concluded.

On Saturday, the two McLaren drivers were running in fourth and fifth place behind Charles Leclerc's Ferrari. This would have earned the team nine points in the constructors' championship, eight more than McLaren ultimately scored.

McLaren currently sits third in the constructors' standings. The Woking-based team is seven points ahead of Red Bull Racing but trails Ferrari by 106 points.

On Sunday, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella also revisited the topic. The Italian told GPblog, among others: "The conversations that we are having, they are not finished, but it's not because we need to go back discussing if Lando was alongside Oscar. Like, that's not the interesting bit. For me, the interesting bit is a reflection that all the stakeholders, the team, the drivers will have to make around leading together the team.

"I'm pleased that Lando, at some stage in the race, adopted this way of thinking. This is what I expect as a team principle. This is what the 1,000 people that work at McLaren expect from our drivers. So it's good that we have had this example, and I expect definitely more of that in the future," the Italian concluded.