It’s a short journey from Qatar to the season finale in Abu Dhabi, but in the few quiet moments they do get, senior McLaren figures must be wondering how they ended up here.

On the one hand, Lando Norris is the favourite to win the title this weekend and complete the team’s first drivers-constructors championship double since 1998.

But on the other, Oscar Piastri has been usurped for second place by the in-form Max Verstappen, who trails Norris by only 12 points.

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Unfortunately for McLaren, it wears the blame for dragging out the championship battle — tremendous though it is for the sport, with a last-race thriller set up for this weekend.

The Las Vegas double disqualification was embarrassing for its timing but only so detrimental in terms of points. Norris still had a chance to seal the deal in Qatar, and even when Piastri emerged as the strong driver in Lusail, it only increased the odds that McLaren could lock down a one-two title finish by the end of the year.

But that all changed just seven laps into the race, when the team infamously missed the cue to pit both cars as ever other driver entered pit lane.

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Team principal Andrea Stella offered up the chance of getting stuck traffic as one explanation, telling F1 TV that Piastri and Norris would have got stuck in the midfield had they pitted but had some other cars stayed out, which would have ruined their races.

Staying out, though, had a similar effect, with both drivers dropping behind other cars at both stops. Norris would have finished behind both Carlos Sainz and Andrea Kimi Antonelli before the latter’s late mistake to cough up fourth place.

CEO Zak Brown suggested that it was less to do with what McLaren’s rivals might do and instead was down to the team’s belief that it would be better to minimise running on the hard tyre, which an early stop wouldn’t allow.

But the hard tyre ended up being a strong compound, and there wasn’t enough degradation for tyre choice to be an influential performance factor anyway.

There was one other factor at play, though.

Though both denied that there was any overarching policy — no papaya rule — that prevented both cars from pitting in the pursuit of fairness, Stella did admit that the risk Norris could lose places for having to double-stack was an element of the team’s decision-making.

“Certainly for Lando there was the extra consideration of losing additional time because of the double-stacked pit stop,” he said, per ESPN. “It was in the consideration, but it wasn’t the main reason not to stop both cars.”

Other teams — and even former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins, now a television pundit — suggested there could be no other significant reason not to pit Piastri and therefore Norris.

But taking at face value the team’s insistence that the risk of traffic was the compelling argument, it’s hard not to see the irony that its eventual decision did exactly that.

“We thought that traffic could have been a problem for both cars,” Stella said. “In reality that was not the right interpretation of the situation at the time that we should have had.”

PIT TALK PODCAST: McLaren manages to turn an easy Oscar Piastri victory into a Max Verstappen cruise, hurting the Australian’s title campaign and cutting Lando Norris’s lead to 12 points over the Dutchman. With three drivers now in contention, what are the permutations for this weekend’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix?

THE PRECEDENTS

A lot has been made of McLaren’s so-called papaya rules this season, though the team says they boil down to requiring the drivers not to crash into each other.

But that’s an oversimplification given every team has had the same self-evident rule since the dawn of motorsport.

While it’s true the rules are not some multi-volume compendium describing actions and outcomes for every racing eventuality, it’s also true to say they have triggered the team to act in an almost unprecedented way this season as it attempts to control the outcome of the championship.

McLaren’s interventions began at the very first round in Australia.

Piastri, recovering from a slow start that dropped him to third, was comfortably the quicker and more confident McLaren driver in the slippery conditions. After forcing Verstappen into a mistake for second, he shredded his gap to Norris and started sizing up an overtake for the lead of his home race.

But then McLaren told him to hold station — “I mean, I’m faster, but okay,” he radioed back, clearly bemused — in a painful abundance of caution given the conditions.

The team changed its mind only a few laps later, but by then the best of Piastri’s tyres had been used, and a small mistake dropped out of striking distance.

McLaren explained later that a combination of the slippery conditions, wearing tyres, impending rain and backmarkers ahead on track triggered the team orders that came across as a lack of faith in the drivers. The paddock wondered at the time whether that level of pedantry would set the tone for the season.

In many ways it did. It’s not just that McLaren retained the same interventionist posture; it’s also that Piastri — by circumstance rather than by bias, it should be noted — has ended up on the losing side of the team’s various interferences.

The highest profile incident was the Italian Grand Prix, where McLaren ordered Piastri to hand over second place after a slow pit stop for Norris demoted the Englishman to third.

The call was made on the grounds that Norris was promised he wouldn’t be undercut if he gave Piastri pit priority.

Why was Piastri’s given pit priority? It was another case caution abundance. Had a safety car interrupted the race after Norris had pitted but before Piastri had entered the lane, Piastri would have ended up in second place with a free pit stop. It would have been difficult to order a swap at the safety car restart — and Piastri would presumably have wanted to chase down Verstappen anyway.

The same level of in-race intervention wasn’t applied in Singapore, where Norris barged Piastri out of the way — after bouncing off Verstappen’s car — on the first lap to take third place, a position he held to the finish.

It took until after the fact for McLaren to decide that the move didn’t comply with its racing rules to avoid contact, and Norris was subsequently given an unnamed internal penalty for the rest of the season.

That penalty was almost immediately rescinded, however, when Piastri was judged to have been at fault for causing the first-turn pileup in the Austin sprint that resulted in both McLaren drivers retiring on the spot — though, as in Singapore, the stewards deemed it a racing incident.

The combination of those two instances left Piastri out of pocket six points relative to Norris — or 12 points if you were to include the team orders of Monza.

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PAPAYA CREEP

Even if Qatar was not an overt expression of some new clause of the papaya rules, it’s difficult not to see it as an extension of the theme.

McLaren’s efforts to maintain internal harmony by constantly arbitrating fairness is on some level laudable, and you must admit that the endeavour has been largely successful. There’s been no blow-up between Norris and Piastri despite the high stakes.

But there’s always a risk in the grey areas, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that McLaren fell foul of that risk in Lusail.

The safety car emerging on lap 7 was not a team error or a case of improper racing outside the scope of the team’s internal rules. It was pure luck — good luck for Piastri, bad luck for Norris.

It was lucky for Piastri, who was having a standout weekend and who had earnt pit stop priority by having qualified better and by leading the race.

It was bad luck for Norris, who had scotched his final Q3 lap and then lost a place to Verstappen at the start.

Yet the perceived fairness or otherwise of the fortune or misfortune of the situation became a factor in deciding whether McLaren made the obvious call to pit.

Even if it wasn’t the decisive factor, it played a role, and that is an extraordinary creep in the team’s mission to keep things fair.

As debatable as the call in Italy was, there was a logic to it — the team had made a mistake that adversely affected one of the drivers when the race was all but over. Certainly you can argue that it was simply bad luck for Norris, but there was a rational argument to make, and the team made it.

Other cases have involved justifiable judgement calls about what sort of racing the team does or does not want to see. Again, it’s contentious, but it’s within McLaren’s purview to make those judgements.

To try to balance out the provision of good or bad luck, though, is another matter entirely.

The result of McLaren’s decision appeared to be to gamble — and lose — the race victory in part to try to moderate Piastri’s good luck and Norris’s misfortune.

It hurt Piastri more, however, costing him between four and seven points or perhaps more to Norris, depending on your preferred counterfactual.

And if some element in the team does believe that luck is up for debate on the pit wall, what must they think about the Hungarian Grand Prix, which Piastri would have won had Norris not lucked into the quicker strategy after getting a terrible start?

Or what about Silverstone, where the Australian copped a contentious safety car penalty that delivered a 14-point swing in Norris’s favour?

Or what of Imola, where Piastri was given his first pit stop too early and dumped into traffic while Norris got the clearer run?

Of course no-one really thinks these things should be deliberately balanced out to account for what any racing fan will tell you is simply the fortunes of motor racing. To add them up to mount a case for Piastri somehow being the moral title leader would come across as a serious case of sour grapes.

This is sport. Stuff happens.

But in Qatar, even if it played only a minor role in losing the race, McLaren flirted with straying into that sort of murky territory where every moment of good luck should be balanced against bad.

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR PAPAYA RULES?

Despite Stella raising the potential negative consequences for Norris as a factor in the team’s decision-making, both Piastri and Norris doubted the idea that ‘fairness’ — whatever its definition — would have played a role in the strategic howler in Qatar.

Piastri, though clearly gutted, cautioned that his disappointment shouldn’t be overblown.

“It’s certainly not a catastrophe,” he said. “I think we made a wrong decision today, I think that’s clear, but it’s not like the world ended.

“Obviously it hurts at the moment, but with time, things will get better.

“There have been lots of difficult moments — this year, previous seasons together — and I feel like you always become stronger through some of these moments, but it all depends on how you deal with it.”

McLaren’s end-of-season review was always going to be interesting, with the team romping to the constructors championship and still likely to end up with the drivers title, though Norris will be under immense pressure to seal the deal this weekend in Abu Dhabi.

But how the team reflects on the way it dealt with the drivers battling for the title could have repercussions for next season and the years beyond, with the assumption being not only that McLaren will continue being a force in Formula 1 but also that Piastri and Norris will continue matching each other on track.

Will it be worth McLaren’s while to continue building increasingly knotty precedents on its papaya rules philosophy?

“I don’t think we need to change that approach,” Piastri insisted. “I think it yields a lot of positives.

“Yes, there are some tough moments, but there are also a lot of tough moments if you go in a different direction to that.

“I don’t think we need to change anything.”

But the rules could be up for their sternest test this weekend, when the title battle finally comes to a head in Abu Dhabi.