Practice is the pits for Norris
03 October 2025, Singapore –Lando Norris, winner in Singapore last year, came to grief in second practice for this year’s event – in the Marina Bay pit lane – as McLaren teammate and World Championship leader Oscar Piastri set the fastest time on an incident-strewn day.
An accident waiting to happen
That is the clearest way to sum up the ludicrous incident that saw Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari collect Norris’s McLaren in the pit lane. The Ferrari driver, desperate to get back into the action after a second red flag, was waved straight into Norris’s path by the Ferrari mechanics. Many seasoned F1 observers have been predicting this kind of needless collision and say a new approach to pit lane procedures is required.
‘The session you don’t want to miss’, but several of them did
What made matters worse is that FP2 is the crucial component of pre-qualifying practice because it offers drivers the chance to pursue pure performance in the conditions they are likely to encounter in the race. George Russell was first to spurn the offer when his Mercedes went head-on into the barriers between Turns 16 and 17. ‘A bit of a weird one,’ said the 27-year-old Englishman. ‘Not too sure what happened. Thankfully I went in front-on and didn’t do too much damage.’ But enough to end his session there and then... Next to come a cropper was Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson. The New Zealand driver, straight from a brilliant weekend in Baku, got off-line out of Turn 16, couldn’t regain control and hit the wall hard on the right-hand side. His momentum carried him into pit lane and triggered a second red flag.
Normal service restored – on one side of the McLaren garage
Oscar Piastri was relieved to rediscover some familiar form after his low-key performance in Baku. The 24-year-old Australian finished the day on top of the times with a lap in 1m 30.714s and an average speed of 195.528 km/h. ‘I found my feet on the Medium tyres, and the Soft was good,’ he said. ‘The car’s been in a good place.’ Not so for teammate Norris, who was downbeat and down on himself after finishing fifth-fastest, almost half-a-second off Piastri’s pace. ‘Oscar’s quick, I’ve got nothing to complain about,’ Norris said. ‘I’m just not happy with my driving.’
P1: who knew...
... that Piastri had a wry sense of humour? Coming through Turn 19 in the first hour of practice to find a slow-moving Lewis Hamilton in his path, Piastri called in on team radio to say, ‘Ferrari will invent mirrors one day, I hope.’ It was nearly last laugh on the Australian, though: in the last minute of the session Piastri got his McLaren dangerously unbalanced over the Singapore kerbs, giving fans the biggest ‘moment’ of that opening hour.
On for young and old
Of the rookies in the 2025 field, Isack Hadjar stood out with second place for Racing Bulls in second practice to add to his seventh in the first hour. The Frenchman’s time was just over a tenth of a second slower than Piastri and fractionally faster than Max Verstappen could manage for the senior Red Bull team. But, at the other end of the spectrum, the man who really caught the eye was the oldest driver in the pack. Fernando Alonso parked his Aston Martin on top of the P1 time sheet with a lap of 1:31.116, then secured a fine fourth-fastest time in P2. All of this a mere 15 years after his second win in Singapore...
Catch it while you can...
The legendary Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, that is, the car making its racing farewell at Marina Bay this weekend. The man who had already wrapped up the 2025 Porsche Carrera Cup Asia title, Dylan Pereira, started as he means to go on with the fastest time in the 45-minute practice session. The Portuguese-Luxembourg driver, 28, clocked 2 mins 03.499 secs in his 18-lap session in the Team Shanghai Yonda BWT entry – that’s an average speed of 143.622 km/h and a comfortable seven-tenths quicker than Bayley Hall’s EBM machine. Qualifying for the PCCA’s first 12-lap race takes place at 16:15 on Saturday.
F1 Academy: title-chasers set the benchmark
21-year-old Frenchwoman Doriane Pin, known as the ‘Pocket Rocket’, produced a stirring last lap in qualifying for Saturday’s first F1 Academy race, but lost out by just four-hundredths of a second to Ferrari-backed Dutch driver Maya Weug, who is still pursuing Pin for the 2025 title. Pin topped the times in free practice but continued her 2025 run of failing to secure a single pole position. Weug beat Pin in both Singapore races last season, but Pin enjoyed a 20-point lead coming into Marina Bay this time. ‘I love this track!’ says Pin, who races under the Mercedes banner. ‘It’s very technical and it’s very long. To put everything together is definitely a challenge.’ Lisa Billard, the 16-year-old Frenchwoman who finished a splendid second in the recent F1 Academy rookies’ test, became the first wild card this season to qualify in the top eight with fifth-fastest overall. F1 Academy uses a reverse grid for the first of its two races, which means that Saturday’s pole-sitter will be Lia Block of Williams, who scored two excellent fourth places here last year.
Cold comfort
One of the main talking-points of the 16th Singapore Grand Prix weekend came before track action got under way. Many of the drivers think Marina Bay is, metaphorically, the coolest track on the calendar. But there is no denying that, literally, the Lion City is not a cool place to be in a Formula 1 cockpit. But this year’s race has been declared a ‘heat hazard’ event, and the drivers are required to wear a special cooling vest which pumps chilled water through tubes in the garment. Any driver who opts not to endure that discomfort must put a half-kilo of ballast in his car to compensate for the weight differential. Vest or no vest, things got too hot For Alex Albon at the start of the first practice session. His Williams came into the pits belching smoke, the rear end of the car caught alight because of a suspected brake hardware problem, and Albon’s first practice was over before it began.