Les Combes produced two first-lap collisions at Spa on Sunday. The stewards punished one and waved the other through, and Oscar Piastri wants to know where that leaves the rest of the grid.
Lewis Hamilton took five seconds for tipping George Russell into a spin. Charles Leclerc, who left Piastri nowhere at the same corner, faced no action at all.
The published reasoning explains the gap. On Hamilton, per documents cited by Crash.net, the stewards concluded "Car 63 remained within the available racing room and that the collision was caused by Car 44 being unable to maintain sufficient separation."
Mitigation halved what could have been a ten-second penalty. Hamilton "acknowledged the presence of Car 63, attempted to leave appropriate racing room and made a genuine attempt to avoid contact," and the contact came "from a loss of front-end grip rather than from an aggressive or deliberate manoeuvre."
Leclerc's incident was judged on overlap. Motorsport.com carried the verdict: "Car 81 had some overlap on Car 16 but the front axle of Car 81 was not ahead of the front axle of Car 16 and there was no possibility of Car 81 completing an overtake from that position."
On intent, the stewards were equally clear: "Car 16 did not deliberately crowd Car 81 off the edge of the track. Car 16 followed the racing line before the entry to Turn 5 by moving slightly to the left to open up for Turn 5 and side to side contact occurred between the two cars."
The Race read the distinction as control against positioning. Hamilton could not hold his car; Leclerc chose a line he was entitled to. By that measure the rulings agree with each other.
Piastri is not disputing the letter of it. His worry is the message.
"From where I was at, I was on the white line and got squeezed," the Australian said. "I think we were very lucky not to have a bigger crash because we touched wheels at the start of the braking zone basically."
He stopped short of demanding a sanction:
"I don't really know where I was supposed to go [...] I'm not saying it needed to be a penalty necessarily, but at least a black and white flag or something like that, because if we think that that's fine, it's one thing having touches like that, but even just the incentive of knowing that you can leave everyone the absolute bare minimum space and get away with it. It's not the nicest place to be."
Russell, whose race actually ended in the gravel, was the more forgiving of the two.
"The incident with Lewis, honestly, I think was a racing incident," he told Crash.net. "He didn't do it on purpose. He was more to blame than I, but he didn't do anything reckless."
The driver who benefited from a penalty shrugged; the driver denied one pressed the principle. That is the odd shape of the argument leaving Belgium.
Lando Norris aimed his frustration elsewhere entirely.
"The pace was good enough for easily a podium today," he said, citing a P13 start and unhelpful virtual safety car timing. "I lost 10 seconds because of that, and I lost another five or six in the pit stop. It's 16 seconds that we add on to my race time."
Fifth and seventh, then, from a car both McLaren drivers rated as a podium machine.
