The fastest race in history could have long-lasting championship implications.

No-one has ever completed a race in quicker time than Max Verstappen, who won the Italian Grand Prix in just 73 minutes and 24.325 seconds with an average speed of 250.706 kilometres per hour.

He was 55.513 seconds and 3.12 kilometres per hour faster than the previous record, set in the 2003 edition of the race by Michael Schumacher.

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But the Dutchman’s history-making feat was quickly overshadowed by the latest twist in the championship battle — after McLaren asked title leader Oscar Piastri to hand second place to Lando Norris in the final laps of the race.

Of course this wasn’t a case of the team simply choosing to swing points towards Norris’s campaign. It was the result of a vexed ethical conundrum brought forth by an unforced team error.

But it’s a decision could have significant ramifications for how the rest of the championship battle plays out.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Sometimes the most straightforward races throw up the most difficult situations.

That was the case on lap 46 of 53 at the Italian Grand Prix.

Piastri had just made his pit stop from third place — a slick 1.9 seconds.

Norris, then running second, followed him in on the following lap when disaster struck.

A problem with his front-left wheel left him stationary for 5.9 seconds. By the time he rejoined the track, Piastri was ahead.

Suddenly McLaren had some serious thinking to do.

After some consideration, it decided to tell Piastri to let Norris back through into second place.

“I mean, we said that a slow pit stop was part of racing, so I don’t really get what’s changed here,” Piastri radioed. “But if you really want me to do it, I’ll do it.”

His brief protest aside, he followed through immediately.

Verstappen wins after McLaren pit chaos | 04:05

In equal machinery on similarly aged tyres, he was never going to get back past his teammate.

What could have been a three-point stretch of his championship lead became a three-point cut, reducing his lead to 31 points.

Team orders are common in Formula 1. Usually they take place when a following driver is clearly faster than the leader or when they’re on different strategies.

Rare, however, does a team intervene on the grounds of natural justice. Rarer still does it happen when there’s a championship on the line.

It’s ironic that McLaren’s laudable efforts to be scrupulously fair in this championship battle risk the team itself becoming the chief source of controversy.

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ISN’T THIS JUST LIKE THE 2024 HUNGARIAN GRAND PRIX?

The instruction from Piastri’s race engineer to cede position came with it a throwback to last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, where Norris had accidentally been promoted into the lead through strategy before being asked to give the place back, after which the Australian eased to his maiden grand prix victory.

On the surface the circumstances are similar.

But there are subtle and interesting differences.

The first is that in Hungary the team knew it was going to undercut Norris ahead of Piastri. It followed through with the strategy knowing it would swap them around.

In Monza the drivers would have held position without the pit lane error — but that mistake is “all part of racing,” according to Verstappen, who laughed over team radio after hearing what McLaren had done.

“They run the team how they want to run it,” he later told Sky Sports. “From my side, mistakes happen. Sometimes you can have a slow stop or you can make a mistake or have a failure. That’s all part of racing.”

The other crucial difference is that Norris encouraged the team to pit Piastri first in an exchange with his engineer, Will Joseph.

Joseph: “Lando we will box this lap onto the soft tyre.”

Norris: “Did you want to box the other car first?”

Joseph: “Yep, we’ll do that. We’ll swap it around, so stay out.”

Norris: “Well, only if he doesn’t undercut, otherwise I’ll box first.”

Joseph: “There will be no undercut.”

Chaos as Norris forced off by Verstappen | 00:28

As the leading driver on the road, Norris got pit stop priority. That gave him the choice to stop first or second. You could argue whatever happened next — good or bad — should have been worn by the driver who made the decision

Piastri said he wasn’t aware that he’d been stopped first in part because Norris had argued for it.

But Stella didn’t see it that way. As in Hungary last year, he said he saw this as purely a team matter.

“Today when we started the pit stop sequencing we started the sequencing of pitting Oscar first but with the clear intent that we would not swap the positions,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella told F1 TV.

“Unfortunately this compounded with the fact we had a slow pit stop [for Norris], but because we had the sequence with Oscar first and then the slow pit stop, we thought that the fair thing to do was to go back to the positions that we had before the pit stop.

“I’m sure Oscar will be very comfortable with this. He already was comfortable during the race. We show again the values, the principles, that we have at McLaren.”

While Stella did link those values back to last year’s race in Hungary, he identified that race as only one milestone in the evolution of the team’s racing rules.

“We have Hungary, but after Hungary we had so many conversations, so much alignment with each other as to how we go racing, so I don’t think we need to go so far back,” he said.

“I think we just refer to the principles and the approach that we have in the way we go racing. I think it’s all right.”

And for the avoidance of doubt, he said there was no inclination to benefit Norris because of last weekend’s power unit problem.

“The decision we made today doesn’t have to do with what happened in the Netherlands,” he emphasised. “It’s completely independent of the DNF that the team caused in the Netherlands for Lando.

“This is a completely separate situation. We take one race at a time.”

THE JUSTIFICATIONS

Despite Piastri’s initially protestation, after the race he appeared happy to toe the team line that justice had been done.

If there was any pain, it might have been eased by the fact his title lead was cut by only three points.

But he also alluded to an interesting non-racing justification.

“If you’re in opposite teams, then yes, it’s very obvious that you just take the luck that you get,” he told Sky Sports. “But when you’re in the same team, it’s the same pit crew, same mechanics — there’s a lot at stake not just for us [the drivers] but for the whole team.

“I think today the decision to swap back was fair. Lando was ahead of me the whole race. I don’t have any issues with that. But we will definitely discuss it.”

The team element of motorsport is one of its great quirks — that a driver’s greatest rival is their teammate.

That also applies to mechanics and engineers inside the team. They’re assigned to one car and become integral to their driver’s championship challenge.

Pit stops embody motorsport’s fundamental contradiction. A few times each race the mechanics from both sides of the garage come together to service whichever car comes down the lane irrespective of whether it’s their driver.

McLaren has experience trying to keep both its garages on the same page. In 2007 a representative of Fernando Alonso infamously handed out envelopes stuffed with cash to every mechanic who wasn’t working on Lewis Hamilton’s car in an apparent attempt to curry favour. The team found out and required all the money be donated to charity.

In 2016 Mercedes even swapped Hamilton and Nico Rosberg’s mechanics in a bid to eliminate the entrenched divisions between garages.

We don’t know whose mechanics were working on Norris’s front-left corner, but the last thing McLaren will want is any excuse to create any sort of tension between the garages. Swapping positions on track takes the heat out of the situation.

“They don’t want to be the reason to upset one driver or another,” Norris said. “If I come flat out into my 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.”

The Briton also argued that it was wrong to suggest he’d ultimately won from the situation.

While the team order had handed him second place, he rightly pointed out that the team’s mistake had still obliterated what had been a comfortable buffer between him and Piastri, allowing the Australian to race him to the flag.

“Why should things get defined like that?” he told Sky Sports. “We were free to race after — in fact he gained from the whole situation — he had DRS, he could fight against me, so I still lost out through it.

“The same thing would’ve happened if it was vice versa. If I was behind before and he had the worse pit stop and ended up behind, I’d have to let him through.

“I earnt my right to be ahead, to have that fairness. None of us wants it to happen like this. I don’t. I don’t choose for these things to happen. I don’t want to have to let him past or have to get let past.

“I don’t choose these things, but we have to do what we think is correct as a team, do things the fair way. That’s how we want to do it.

“As a team we don’t care what others say, what other opinions there are about it. We do it the way want to, the way we think is correct, and that’s what we need to do.”

BUT WHERE DOES IT END?

McLaren was damned no matter what it chose to do after Norris’s slow stop. It chose what it felt was the least worst option. Both were arguable.

But it has now created a precedent for itself.

Rather than taking its hands off the wheel and allowing the status quo to reign, McLaren has a set a precedent that it will interfere in some situations when it perceives it has done an injustice to one of its drivers.

On the surface that seems fair enough. Clearly it argues that that’s the case.

But you can extend that logical argument considerably, creating more difficult questions.

In Imola Piastri should have finished second behind Verstappen but was committed to the wrong strategy. Norris passed him after a late safety car, having been put on a better strategy. Should this no-adverse-outcome rule have applied then?

In Hungary Piastri was put onto a two-stop strategy that the team didn’t realise was slower than the one-stop strategy it offered Norris after the Briton got a worse start and ended up with nothing to lose. Norris won the race. Should Piastri have been swapped back into the lead as a form of justice?

What about at the British Grand Prix, where the team said it disagreed with the penalty that dropped Piastri out of a dominant lead and into second behind Norris? There Piastri asked — searchingly more than expectedly — whether he should be swapped back into the lead if the team agreed the penalty had been applied in error. The team chose not to do so, and he finished second.

Alternatively, given Norris’s engine-related DNF in the Netherlands was due to a failure in a part supplied by the team, should Piastri be forced to retire from a race to balance the points?

Executing any of the above examples feels contrary to what most would accept is simple racing fortune. But they’re logically connected to what happened in Monza.

If it’s fair to correct one team error, why not all of them?

And would the team still feel comfortable taking this maximalist approach to maintaining fairness if this were the last race of the season? Or the penultimate round? Would Piastri really be expected to hand Norris the title lead later in the season if circumstances created such a scenario?

And does it tally after Piastri was sent out to slipstream Norris into Q3 on Saturday after the Briton was left vulnerable through mistakes of his own? Getting Norris into Q3 was in the team’s interests, but was it in the interests of fairness?

McLaren will hope it doesn’t have to face a similar situation again. But with its drivers so closely matched, this surely won’t be the last difficult question it faces.