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McLaren will now prioritise Lando Norris over team-mate Oscar Piastri in a bid to overturn Max Verstappen's 2024 Formula 1 drivers' championship lead.
The team has come under increasing pressure to back Norris as his title chances have been transformed by McLaren's impressive development progress.
And a nightmare weekend for Red Bull at Monza means Verstappen's lead is more fragile than ever, with 62 points separating the pair with eight rounds remaining.
So far McLaren's played it completely fair between both drivers. It allowed Piastri to attack and pass Norris on the opening lap at Monza and it even made Norris hand Piastri first position back in Hungary to balance out Norris's strategic advantage.
That’s going to change from this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, though, as team boss Andrea Stella revealed to the BBC.
Stella told the BBC "We [will] bias our support to Lando but we want to do it without too much compromise on our principles.”
Stella said those principles include the team’s interest always coming first and being fair to both drivers.
He said he didn’t want to win both championships “in a reckless way” and said Piastri was on board to help Norris.
"Even when I said to Oscar: 'Would you be available to give up a victory?' He said: 'It's painful, but if it's the right thing to do now, I will do it'."
A sensible move in theory, tough in practice
Scott Mitchell-Malm
McLaren didn’t have specific rules at the last race at Monza beyond not taking undue risk, which is why it had two flashpoints to deal with: Piastri’s move on Norris on the first lap, and not ordering Piastri to let Norris by at the end of the grand prix.
It seems safe to assume that a direct repeat will now be avoided. Either Piastri will not make that kind of pass to start with or McLaren will intervene to prioritise Norris’s points return once it is completely clear Piastri cannot gain a further position himself.
That’s still tricky to manage and will come down to individual situations. At Monza, the move Piastri made and Norris’s attempts to avoid contact meant Charles Leclerc was able to split the McLarens on the exit of the second chicane.
Clearly that’s sub-optimal for McLaren, not just Norris. Especially as Piastri could have tucked in behind Norris entering the corner rather than overtake him (and Piastri could have done so without losing a place to Leclerc).
That will almost certainly be expected of him now – but it would be risky to ban Piastri from racing Norris at all, mainly on opening laps, because of the chaos of such circumstances. Is it better for Piastri to pass Norris cleanly and without any detriment to Norris, and McLaren swap the positions later on, than Piastri avoid passing Norris at all costs and risk losing a place himself? McLaren will need to consider that.
But maximising Norris’s points return with in-race orders is simpler, especially if properly agreed in advance and Piastri’s signed off on it. At Monza, with that agreed, it would have been easy to get Piastri to move aside on the final lap when victory was clearly out of reach, and give Norris three extra points.
It’s a sensible enough strategy in principle with the championship becoming more realistic than a few races ago. How it works in practice will be the key. And even if McLaren and Piastri play their parts perfectly, it still remains the case that Norris needs to do a slightly better job himself.
If he hits his extremely high peaks on a more consistent basis, and judges a few situations slightly better, Norris won’t need direct assistance anyway. Piastri’s role will be in taking points off Verstappen, rather than gifting some to his team-mate.
Gary Anderson's take
If I was Lando Norris’s engineer, here is what I would be doing in Baku and the following races.
One of Norris’s biggest problems is feeling the tyre grip off the start line when the tyres are cooler than normal. Sitting on the front row for that amount of time is very stressful and Piastri and many others are much better at this.
Basically, you are leading the pack and going into the unknown grip-wise.
What he needs to do now in Baku is practice the first corner straight out of the pits with tyres that are around the same temperature as they would be off the startline.
It won’t eradicate the problem as there won’t be the cars around him, but it would improve his confidence in that very tense situation.
