McLaren’s Oscar Piastri started 6th and recovered from a puncture to take 5th place at the 2026 F1 Singapore GP. He echoed his teammate Lando Norris in saying that their placings were as good as could be expected on Sunday.
The driver from Melbourne kept fairly close to his teammate all through the first at around 2-3s, before a slow first stop left a much bigger gap.
“I think that was definitely the most we could have done. You know, we didn’t have the pace to do any more. Obviously here is a massive track position race, so I felt like personally I did a pretty good job.”
Conditions “pretty tough” with 2026 cars in Singapore
After crashing together Saturday, at the start Piastri and Norris were again wheel to wheel, but uneventfully.
“I knew where he was. I was pretty comfortable. But yeah, that was just the normal stuff.”
Piastri persevered through the South Asian heat and humidity in what he called “the most flat-out Singapore I’ve had”.
As the tyres lacked any significant deg, it was a race where pushing 100% was the name of the game.
“With this year’s tyres and cars, a lot of the races are much more flat out in a lot of ways. And I think, given here, you’ve used the soft and medium, it’s a good indicator that you wanted to get as much energy in the tyres as you could. So yeah, it was pretty tough.“
Piastri suffers a puncture, but comes out ahead
He then caught a slow puncture in one of those mediums, coming in on Lap 40 for another set of soft tyres. At that stage he was over 40s behind Lewis Hamilton and over 25s adrift Kimi Antonelli directly in front of him in terms of position.
“Obviously, the puncture was a bit of a shame. But ironically, I think it actually probably helped get Lewis at the end.”
Hamilton slid backwards in the late stages on old tyres. He fell out of 2nd on Lap 46, then missed Turn 1 on Lap 54 to fall to 5th as Antonelli passed him, before Norris did the same a tour later.
Piastri, seconds a lap quicker than car #44 once he boxed, was then able to pass the seven-time World Champion with two laps to go on much fresher soft tyres.
“Once you get there, it doesn’t take much to overheat the tyres and you kind of get stuck at their pace. But with how quickly I was catching, I would have been pretty disappointed in myself if I didn’t get past. A bit of excitement, which was good. Because otherwise, it was a pretty lonely race.”
