Former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports F1 analyst Martin Brundle has backed McLaren’s team orders decision during the Italian Grand Prix.
The team ordered Oscar Piastri to let his team-mate Lando Norris overtake him after a slow pitstop. In the latter stages of the race, McLaren pitted Piastri one lap earlier than Norris on the proviso that the Australian driver would not undercut his team-mate. Norris was running in second at the time with Piastri in third. However, a slow pitstop meant that Piastri had taken second by the time Norris came out of the pits.
As the slow pitstop was not down to Norris, the team ordered Piastri to let the Briton back past.
“If Norris had for example run long in his stop and scattered his mechanics, or it had simply been a slow stop, then that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” Brundle wrote in his Sky Sports F1 column after confirming he felt the decision from McLaren was the right thing to do.
“But there were a number of aspects to this scenario including prior discussions and agreements. The cohesion of this team is what’s making it so dominant this season and both drivers are smart enough to realise that for both now and into the future.
“Don’t judge either of them for playing the team game, all the other teams on the grid would kill to have two great drivers working in tandem for the good of the team like this, while also racing the wheels off the cars and doing their best to beat each other.
“At least Piastri did gain the advantage of now being in Norris’s DRS rear wing open range, but Norris continued to have the pace.”
Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella explained the reason behind the decision while speaking to F1 TV after the race.
“Let me start by saying that the decision we made today doesn’t have [anything] to do with what happened in the Netherlands – it’s completely independent of the DNF that the team caused for Lando,” he said. “This is a completely separate situation and we take one race at a time.
“Today, when we started the pitstop sequencing, we started the sequencing pitting Oscar first but with the clear intent that we would have not swapped the positions. Unfortunately, this compounded with the fact that we had a slow pitstop [for Norris].
“Because we had the sequence with Oscar first and then the slow pitstop, we thought that the fair thing to do was to go back to the positions that we had before the pitstops. I’m sure Oscar will be very comfortable with this; he already was comfortable during the race.
“We showed again the values and the principles we have at McLaren.”
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