Did McLaren need to order Oscar Piastri to let Lando Norris back into second place in Formula 1's Italian Grand Prix?
A slow pitstop for Norris meant Piastri jumped him late on at Monza, with Piastri subsequently asked to drop back behind - a request the championship leader was unimpressed with but ultimately followed.
Here's what our team made of it:
Not a Hungary 2024 repeat
Edd Straw
This wasn't a call McLaren needed to make, as it's very different to Hungary last year (the example the team cited when asking Piastri to move over).
There, the undercut was so powerful that Norris was guaranteed to jump ahead of Piastri by stopping two laps early, given pressure from behind.
This time, Norris would have stayed ahead but for the slow pitstop, for the undercut wasn't that powerful. As Piastri suggested, this was a situation where a slow pitstop is one of those things.
McLaren is playing into the hands of those who argue favouritism for Norris over Piastri here. I'm not convinced it's that, as it seems more likely it's the desire to be scrupulously fair to a fault. McLaren has generally handled these situations well, but this seemed needless and not every single vagary of racing can be balanced out.
Had Piastri jumped Norris exclusively because of the undercut time gain, that would be one thing, but the slow stop was crucial and that is part of racing.
Piastri was probably wise to comply, as in the long-term that keeps the peace and he can afford to let a few points go, but perhaps it would have been different if it was for first place. But behind the scenes, this will surely be a bone of contention.
Needless and silly
Ben Anderson
I think it would have been interesting to see what Piastri would have done had he not just benefitted from a huge points swing thanks to that broken oil line on his team-mate's car at Zandvoort.
If the points gap was closer it would have been a lot harder - and potentially more crucial - to give up those extra three points.
As things stand, Piastri can probably fairly calculate that the benefit of maintaining harmony and complying with McLaren's non-negotiable 'racing principles' outweighs the cost to him in the championship.
But beyond that this is a needless and silly look for McLaren, which seems to be trying to stage manage this world championship and will now have to face lots of questions about where you draw the line between bad luck, fairness to the drivers and team play taking priority.
It's all well and good to try to avoid the antagonism that blighted Mercedes in the Lewis Hamilton/Nico Rosberg years of F1 dominance, but was Leclerc really that big a threat to require an inversion of the sacred pitstop priority? Is the constructors' championship really at such risk to require that level of intervention?
Sure, had Piastri suffered Norris's misfortune in the order they should have stopped, Leclerc would have probably overtaken him for the final podium spot. But that's actually the definition of hard luck, and McLaren couldn't have known that would happen.
When you think about it, Piastri probably gained points from this decision, so that might be why he didn't push back too hard!
What happens if this is repeated?
Scott Mitchell-Malm
Judging this one solely on those circumstances, it's a tough thing for McLaren to ask and not a good thing to do, but I can see why it was reluctantly asked of Piastri.
On some level, I'm fine with this: a blatant team mistake made by a shared part (rather than what could be defined as 'Piastri's side of the garage'), a race Piastri was unlikely to beat Norris in anyway, and a situation easily rectified with the cars running together on track and under no immediate threat from behind.
I think it would have been at least as controversial had McLaren let one of its title-fighting drivers lose ground because of its own mistake - especially one week after Norris was screwed over by reliability.
I also don't buy into suggestions you can already see being made that McLaren's doing everything it can to help Norris, nor do I think it's particularly valid to start trotting out all sorts of hypothetical situations that this precedent could influence.
But there is one very specific scenario that McLaren has left itself open to which is worrying: having to repeat this if the points swing could prove crucial.
McLaren has now intervened directly to address an accidental intervention. Piastri was going to benefit from a six-point swing in a situation many might think is 'just part of racing' - but McLaren's said no. That's easier to do when it's a single race result that doesn't really influence the championship battle, but it begs two questions.
What will McLaren do when such an intervention could sway the title fight? Or will it reach a point where it decides it cannot intervene, even if it has already tipped the scales here?
McLaren must take this to the logical extreme
Valentin Khorounzhiy
Norris was obviously not at fault for the six-point swing that was about to go against him - and, really, too much in motor racing is beholden to random chance, and it is McLaren's duty to rectify it in this particular title race, given its privileged position of car dominance.
In the next race, it must send out Piastri with a faulty engine to make up for what happened at Zandvoort. But Melbourne wasn't very nice also, and hardly Piastri's fault, so it needs to order Norris to go off into the grass at some point from a top-two position.
Piastri got screwed by strategy in Hungary, so McLaren has to make that right, though I can't quite come up with a mechanism yet. In any case, it also must lobby the FIA to get all the other cars to withdraw from the rest of the season, lest any of them influence the proceedings by giving one of its drivers a timely slipstream or colliding with them.
Still, even like that, there are just so many factors that can influence events. Maybe the only way to be fair is to park both for the rest of the season. That way, neither can get an undue advantage.
