McLaren’s defence of the team order it gave Oscar Piastri to hand second place back to Lando Norris in the closing laps of the 2025 Italian Grand Prix appears to rest on what team boss Andrea Stella called the team’s “clear intent” that its inverted pitstop sequencing “should not have led to a swap of position”.
Ordinarily, the leading McLaren driver in any particular race would automatically have strategic priority. This is a well-established norm in F1 and not particularly controversial. At Monza, this priority fell to Norris - because he was ahead of Piastri throughout their first stint.
McLaren took away that privilege because it ran both cars much further into the race than its immediate rivals, eventually swapping both from medium to soft tyres with less than 10 laps to run, but electing to pit Piastri first to eliminate the risk of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari overtaking Piastri through Piastri having to wait until Norris had stopped before making his own.
Stella admitted ordering both drivers to pit much earlier in the race “would have been the simple solution”, but said “it would have limited the result”.
“We wanted to find a way to pursue a bigger result,” he added. “Like in the case of a red flag, it would have been quite strong with the two McLarens leading.
“And even in terms of a safety car, up until a certain point, it would have been strong.
“And also we wanted to stop late enough to go on softs because then had there been a late safety car, we would have been on soft with [Max] Verstappen on hard.
“So there were incentives from a racing point of view and from an overall result point of view at the end of the race to stay out.
“We stayed out up until the point where we needed to sequence the pitstop in a different way compared to the order in which our two drivers were.”
So this essentially amounts to McLaren chasing the lost cause of somehow beating Verstappen’s Red Bull - which eventually finished 19 seconds up the road - to victory by relying on factors outside of its control.
It’s not a wholly unreasonable position, considering two cars - Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin and Nico Hulkenberg’s Sauber - retired from the race with mechanical failures, and there were several dubious on-track collisions too, but holding out for a safety car to the point where Leclerc puts himself in the second car’s pit window seems unwise in the first instance.
McLaren clearly thought they could beat the maths because of the team’s enshrined and sacrosanct principles/‘PapayaRules’/whatever you want to call them - and the way both drivers strictly adhere to these principles in spite of their own interests.
“We were waiting until the last possible moment to see if there had been a red flag or a safety car,” confirmed Stella.
“So we pursued the team interest and to capitalise as much as possible on this interest, we needed to go first [at the pitstops] with Oscar, then with Lando.
“But the clear intent was this is not going to deliver a swap of positions.
“So the fact that we went first with Oscar, compounded by the slow pitstop of Lando, then led to a swap of positions, and we thought it was absolutely the right thing to go back to the situation pre-existing the pitstop and then let the guys race.
“This is what we did and this is what we think is in compliance with our principles.”
There is precedent for this kind of intervention at McLaren, of course. At the 2024 Hungarian GP Norris was asked to cede victory to Piastri having been unintentionally vaulted into the lead to cover off the threat of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes taking track position away from Norris at the second round of stops.
The difference there was the power of the undercut at the Hungaroring was significantly greater than it was this year at Monza - “not even in the seconds, we go in the tenths of a second” - was how Stella characterised it.
“So for us it was relatively simple to say the intent was that we are not going to swap positions and that's why the slow pitstop compounds with this intent.”
Back in Hungary last year Norris complied, eventually, but waited until the closing laps to do it and didn’t do it before questioning the team’s thinking quite extensively over the radio.
This time, it was Piastri doing the questioning:
“I mean…we said that a slow pitstop was part of racing. So I don’t really get what’s changed here. But if you really want to do it then I’ll do it.”
Piastri clearly felt in the heat of the moment that Norris’s slow left-front wheel change should be classified as bad luck and not something that warrants team intervention according to its principles.
In the post-race press conference, Piastri was more inclined to toe the party line. He called the decision to swap places “a fair request” and a “fair decision”, and said “there’s a lot of people and a culture to protect” at McLaren, re-iterating a position stated previously by both drivers that they are willing to put the team first at all times because they want to have access to what they hope and expect will be winning F1 cars “for years to come”.
But when asked to explain his radio message - that he couldn’t understand what had changed regarding slow pitstops - and whether he expected to be asked to move aside in this specific instance, Piastri replied: “I think the radio call kind of says enough” before adding “I’m sure we’ll discuss it again”.
The inference here is that he considers a slow pitstop to be an isolated situation that doesn’t require one driver to be ordered to move aside for the other - much in the same way you wouldn’t have expected Piastri to pull off the track at Zandvoort to equalise the fact Norris had just suffered a DNF for mechanical reasons that were McLaren's fault.
But it would seem in this specific case, what McLaren intended to do if and when one of its drivers suffered a slow pitstop was trumped by its wider intention to not affect the final result by pitting the second driver ahead of the first one.
It’s quite clear the slow wheel change scenario has been discussed before. But it’s not entirely clear whether the superseding of that by a pitstop sequencing inversion has actually been concretely inserted into the Papaya Rules…
“We will review the case,” said Stella. “We will review also the situation whereby it was a slow speed of the slow pitstop in isolation.
“We already have our principles in relation to that. We will review our principles in relation to that and reinforce the direction if this is in agreement with our drivers.”
For his part, Norris wasn’t especially happy to benefit from this scenario. Much like in his not-really-a-battle battle with Verstappen in 2024, he wants to succeed on his own merit.
“They [McLaren] don't want to be the reason to upset one driver or another through no fault of their own,” he said.
“Today was not my fault. If I came flat out into my [pit] box and I hit all my mechanics out of the way, I don't expect to get the position back.
“But today was out of my control. And in the end, I don't want this. I don't want to win this way through getting given positions or anything like that.
“And the same thing with Oscar. We don't want to lose or win like that.”
Norris was asked whether the team’s position might shift once the constructors’ championship is sealed, perhaps as early as the next race in Azerbaijan, allowing the drivers to go at it with no stage management or orchestration from the pitwall.
“Not that I know of,” was his response. And it seems he doesn’t expect McLaren to significantly change its way of going racing in any circumstance.
“Team is number one, then drivers are second,” he added. “That's how it works.
“Normally when you see teams who don't have enough respect for the team and the opportunities that the team give, it doesn't normally last long.
“And you see that with plenty of other teams, whether it's been Red Bull, Ferrari, or Mercedes, and we want to try and be in this position for a longer period of time than what they have been at the top.
“It's only our second year of fighting for wins. But like Oscar said, the team give us these opportunities. Without the team, then we're just fighting for 10th, and none of us want that.
“Team and the morale, the spirit of the team is priority, and we're below that.”
Additional imagery: Daniele Roversi
