Lando Norris called for his fellow driver Franco Colapinto to be banned from Formula One after he crashed into him in Azerbaijan.

The world champion was a victim of the Alpine man hurtling down the inside of the first corner, a left-hander, after a safety car restart around Baku’s wall-lined track.

The Argentine tagged his own team-mate Pierre Gasly, contact that sent the Frenchman into Norris’s McLaren, ending his race.

A furious Norris said: ‘He should be banned, simple as that. In Formula One you want to be against the best drivers and when stuff like this happens it is because they shouldn’t be there.

‘If you cause a crash on a restart like this, you should have at least a one-race ban.

‘I have not seen it back but just got taken out. The FIA should be stricter.

‘It is just careless. It costs a lot of money. All my parts are in the bin. It is not driving that deserves to be in Formula One.

‘You would expect drivers could anticipate that the grip will be low and tyre temperatures are low (after a safety car period). And they were not even that low.’

Colapinto was handed a ten-second penalty and later a five-place grid drop for the race in Malaysia next weekend.

Norris’s failure to finish saw him fall 116 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli with eight rounds remaining, stalling his distant hopes of defending his title. Yet he vowed: ‘I just keep fighting.’

Winner George Russell disagreed with Norris, making a case for more leniency.

‘A ban would be too harsh for this kind of thing, on cold tyres,’ said Russell. ‘Bans should be reserved for deliberate acts of taking someone out.’