{"id":124584,"date":"2025-09-09T06:56:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T06:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/124584\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T06:56:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T06:56:07","slug":"guys-i-dont-agree-please-the-other-monza-team-orders-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/124584\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Guys, I don’t agree, please’ – The other Monza team orders debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

McLaren wasn’t the only team with a team orders dispute that left one of its drivers frustrated in the middle of Formula 1’s Italian Grand Prix.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Williams was in the hunt for a double points finish when it chose to swap its drivers Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon, while they were eighth and ninth on lap 25 of 53.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sainz was running a long opening stint on the medium tyres, with Albon the highest-placed driver to start on the hard tyres.<\/p>\n

But Sainz was costing Albon time in his fight with those midfield drivers who had already pitted, such as Gabriel Bortoleto’s Sauber.<\/p>\n

By lap 23, Sainz was really struggling on his mediums, locking up and cutting across the run-off at the Variante chicane.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One lap later, while on the start\/finish straight, Williams told Sainz to let Albon through at Turn 4, to which Sainz asked why Williams didn’t just pit him at the end of that lap instead to release Albon and relieve Sainz of his ageing mediums.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I think there’s more to win by\u2026guys, I don’t agree, please,” he told his engineer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His engineer replied: “OK, the situation is you box now and you’re behind five cars and you’ll be stuck in a DRS train, their pace is not good enough, you’re still pulling away from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I think we need to stay out and follow the [team order] instruction.”<\/p>\n

Once through the Ascari chicane, Sainz said “Copy, let’s see if Alex can pull [me along with] the DRS”.<\/p>\n

Sainz obeyed the team order on the next lap and allowed Albon through by sticking to the racing line and lifting off the throttle early into Turn 4 (the second chicane).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Albon did pull away thereafter, closing the gap to Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes in front – and he soon dropped Sainz, who quickly declared “I want the hard, it’s the strongest tyre by far”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sainz pitted on lap 30 for those hard tyres, but any chance of making use of them or scoring points was ruined by his clash with Ollie Bearman’s Haas<\/a> 10 laps later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The team order worked a treat for Albon, though. He was able to catch and pass Antonelli’s Mercedes – despite some “erratic driving” from Antonelli that the stewards took a dim view of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That meant a seventh-place finish on merit for Albon and Williams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the race, Sainz said there wasn’t any reluctance to the team order once he had “perspective of the big picture of the race” from his engineer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, it was team-mate Albon who was somewhat indifferent to making the swap at the time\u2026<\/p>\n

‘It was awkward’\"\"<\/p>\n

There was very little radio chatter on Albon’s side about Sainz stepping aside, with comments about Sainz’s tyres going off and then Albon’s engineer informing Albon that the team was discussing what to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“To be honest, I didn’t speak too much. I was just waiting in many ways,” Albon explained after the race.<\/p>\n

“We didn’t really need to swap positions in the plan, but basically, when Carlos did have clean air, he was quick relative to the people that boxed. But I was even quicker on the harder tyres.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“In a weird way, it was kind of compromising my race. It’s awkward because, actually, Carlos’ pace improved to the point where he was overcutting some cars. You’ve got to let him do his stint.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Once we got clean air, we pushed on, and I think we handled it well as a team. I don’t think there were any issues.<\/p>\n

“I definitely wasn’t fighting to have the clean air. I was pretty happy chilling behind him, but it worked out.”<\/p>\n

Albon was surprised by the pace he had once Sainz released him as he chased down Antonelli’s Mercedes and beat and passed him on merit.<\/p>\n

“It was the right move and I think I went maybe half a second quicker once I got past,” Albon said.<\/p>\n

“It’s hard to know, though, around Monza because you basically have such a huge slipstream and you don’t know how much time you can make up through the corners to offset the slipstream, if that makes sense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“So that’s why [behind him] I was like, \u2018yeah, I’m quicker, but I’m fine. I’m fine to chill out here’.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Actually, I was most probably quicker than I thought I was. And so once I did get the clean air, I made another step.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“But realistically, we just needed clear air because the raw pace of the car has been good all weekend. You’ve seen it through practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Once we got clean air in the race, we could show the pace, that pace, and once we could showcase the pace, you could see the P7 was actually quite a comfortable race for us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McLaren wasn’t the only team with a team orders dispute that left one of its drivers frustrated in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-124584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}