'Title fight refuses to get nasty, even when McLaren create own controversy'

Team boss Andrea Stella (centre) says McLaren's "racing principles" underpin their approach

This Formula 1 title fight between McLaren's Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri just refuses to get nasty, even when the team find themselves embroiled in controversy of their own making.

The Italian Grand Prix threw up the sort of situation that in many - if not most - cases in F1 would be expected to generate acrimony.

For most of the race, Norris and Piastri ran second and third behind Red Bull's Max Verstappen, the Dutchman too fast for Norris, and Norris too fast for Piastri.

But in throwing the strategy dice by running their cars as long as possible before a pit stop, and then deciding to stop them in the 'wrong' order, McLaren generated a problem for themselves.

Piastri was stopped first, when normally in that situation it would be Norris. The Briton said it was fine as long as it did not lead to Piastri ending up ahead of him. The team reassured him it would not.

But it did. In theory, Norris had a gap more than big enough to stop and re-emerge in front. But he had a problem at his pit stop, and came out behind his team-mate.

The team asked Piastri to let him back past. The Australian said he didn't understand but agreed anyway, and they finished Norris-Piastri, the latter's championship lead down by three points to 31.

This very much did not go as would have been expected in previous intra-team title fights.

The typical sort of response to this situation would be for a driver in Piastri's position to refuse to let his team-mate back past. Or to take a lot longer to do it, while complaining vociferously. Or criticise the team afterwards.

It's clear how the winner of the race would have responded if he was in that situation.

"Hah," Verstappen said when told about the swap. "Just because they had a slow stop?"

But then McLaren are very much not running their team in the normal way.

Why revert position?

The moment Oscar Piastri (right) moved over and slowed down to allow McLaren team-mate Lando Norris to overtake him on lap 49 of 53

For McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, McLaren's "racing principles" are everything, and at the heart of them is fairness.

Stella saw this as a very simple situation. Norris deserved second place. The team chose to stop Piastri first, against the normal convention that the lead driver gets priority with strategy. They had their reasons, and they did so with the express intention not to change the order. The order changed because of a team problem over which neither driver had any influence. So the only fair reaction was to revert the positions.

"The pit stop situation is not only a matter of fairness, it's a matter of consistency with our principles," Stella said. "And however the championship goes, what's important is that the championship runs within the principles and the racing values that we have at McLaren, and that we have created together with our drivers.

"The fact that we went first with Oscar, compounded by the slow pit stop 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 pit stop, and then let the guys race.

"This is what we did, and this is what we think is in compliance with our principles."

Piastri disagreed during the race. "We said that a slow pit stop was part of racing," he said, "so I don't really get what changed here. But I'll do it."

Once out of the car, however, the adrenaline now beginning to drain out of him, he said he agreed with the decision.

"It's something that we'll discuss," he said. "We have discussed it before. Today was a fair request. Lando qualified ahead, was ahead the whole race, and lost that spot through no fault of his own.

"I said what I had to say on the radio. And once I got the second request, then I'm not going to go against the team."

Norris said: "If it was the other way around, I would have had to do it. It proves we're a fair team, it's why we're the best team, just because others haven't done that doesn't meant they're right.

"As a team we believe in our own ways, we do it our own way."

Why stop Piastri first?

If McLaren outscore Ferrari by nine points at the next grand prix in Azerbaijan, they will be crowned constructors' champions with seven races still remaining in the season

McLaren have previous experience of this sort of situation.

In Hungary last year, Piastri was on his way to his maiden win, but McLaren chose to pit Norris before him, saying they were worried about a threat from Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes behind.

They knew it would end up with Norris in front of Piastri, but figured they would revert the cars, and trusted Norris to do so. But when they asked him to swap back, it took more than 10 laps and lots of pleading from the team before Norris agreed.

At the time, the threat from Hamilton was so distant as to be almost a figment of the imagination. It felt like McLaren had dug a hole for themselves and thrown themselves needlessly into it.

This situation was not dissimilar.

Stella said that the decision to pit Piastri first was made to protect him from the threat of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, who had pitted several laps before and was closing on fresh tyres.

But Leclerc was 28.5 seconds behind Piastri when McLaren stopped the Australian, and closing at about 0.5secs a lap. The total pit-stop time loss at Monza was 25secs.

So McLaren had at least another three or four laps, and probably more, before they really had to worry about Leclerc. In other words, they really did not need to make this decision - they could have stopped Norris first and then Piastri and not had this problem at all.

Of course, in that situation, had Piastri stopped second, and had he had the same wheel-gun problem as Norris, he, too, would have lost four seconds - and then he would have been under threat from Leclerc. But McLaren didn't know that at the time.

So the decision does not really make sense, at least not on that reasoning. Stella said after the race: "This is something I will review with the strategy team.

"The strategy team elaborated that that was the right sequencing because there could have been some threat for Oscar. We will review the numbers and we will check whether that was necessary or not."

There is, though, one logical reason for the order of pit stops, even if Stella did not say it.

Had McLaren stopped Norris first and then there had been a safety car during the lap before Piastri stopped, then that would have put Piastri ahead. Perhaps that's really what McLaren were tying to avoid.

The big picture

What's remarkable about all this is the equanimity with which McLaren's drivers are dealing with this specific situation, and the wider championship battle.

It speaks to their particular characters, but also how much Stella has managed to get the whole McLaren team to buy into his culture.

It's a culture - and leadership - that in two short years has turned the team from low-midfield runners at the start of 2023, just after Stella took over, into constructors' world champions last year, and now the dominant force in F1 this year.

Racing drivers are in a unique position. They are competitive athletes out for personal success. But they are dependent on their team for the machinery with which they will achieve it.

Usually, in F1, those two, powerful opposing forces are what create the on-track drama and off-track tension between team-mates contesting a title.

This happened with Hamilton and Nico Rosberg at Mercedes, Piastri's manager Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel at Red Bull, Hamilton and Fernando Alonso at McLaren, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at McLaren, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams, and so on.

Stella's achievements at McLaren are multi-faceted. But managing to control this is certainly among the most remarkable.

Both drivers have bought into this.

As Piastri said: "We don't want the chance of success just for this year. There's a big regulation change next year. We don't know how competitive we're going to be, and we don't know how competitive anyone's going to be.

"Ultimately, we want the best chance at winning championships for as long as we're Formula 1 drivers, and we're both at McLaren for a very long time.

"Protecting the people around us that give us this opportunity is a very important thing. It's easy enough to put yourself second at times like that."

Norris added: "That was beautiful. He said it well. I don't need to add any more."

Before the race, there was another - much less publicised and obvious example of this.

In qualifying, Piastri was asked by the team to give Norris a tow in the second session. At the time, Norris was in danger of being knocked out - which would have meant qualifying out of the top 10 and giving Piastri a massive helping hand in the championship.

But Piastri agreed without hesitation.

Afterwards, Stella was asked whether he would accept it if that sort of thing stopped happening as the title fight came to a climax.

He said: "I would consider it relatively, potentially not the most elegant move. But sometimes racing doesn't necessarily require elegance as long as you operate within the principles and the rules of the team."