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Lando Norris has not done enough to earn total priority from McLaren - but the reality of the Formula 1 season means McLaren looks set to assist him with team orders after all.
Red Bull’s struggles have made McLaren increasingly confident that a Norris title bid is possible alongside its own strong chance of winning the constructors’ championship.
But it has so far opted not to employ team orders, and Norris has finished directly behind team-mate Oscar Pisatri twice in the last three races, including last weekend’s Italian Grand Prix.
McLaren’s cars started first and second on the grid at Monza with championship rival Red Bull back on the fourth row. And though it still slashed the gap to Red Bull in the constructors’ standings to just eight points, it was inevitably disappointed to miss out on victory.
This was a golden opportunity to take the lead in the teams’ contest and for Norris to take a bigger chunk out of Verstappen’s drivers’ championship advantage.
But as there were no team orders at play once again, Norris was overtaken by Piastri on the opening lap. McLaren later let Ferrari and Charles Leclerc have track position and, in the end, the win with a one-stop strategy - so Norris, in third, only gained eight points on Verstappen.
Norris suggested after the race that the time Leclerc gained against the two McLarens when Piastri overtook Norris on lap one, and Leclerc split the two cars as well, won him the race. That in itself is probably an oversimplifcation and too definitive given all that followed.
But many are understandably asking if the way it was handled overall was not in McLaren’s best interests, especially in the context of a distant Norris drivers’ championship hope, and if the wrong McLaren finished second because there was no order for Piastri to let Norris by when it became clear he was not going to pass Leclerc and win.
Tackling the Piastri pass on lap one first: it was a brilliant and perfectly judged move that even Norris begrudgingly accepted was well-executed. And Piastri was entitled to make it – McLaren’s ‘papaya rules’ we heard get mentioned during the race basically prohibit contact and excessive risks but not more than that.
Team boss Andrea Stella did suggest that McLaren needed to review the move to make sure it was within the agreed principles but it’s hard to see how it wasn’t unless Piastri had been told he could not race his team-mate at all.
The reason for the review, though, is that McLaren now sees a need to establish some ground rules in order to "pursue, in the best possible manner, both the constructors’ championship and the drivers’ championship".
“We have to now be in the condition to acknowledge that not only the constructors’ championship is possible, but even from the driver’s point of view, with the performance that we have in the car and some of the struggle we see with Red Bull, it is definitely possible," said Stella.
WHY NO MONZA ORDER?
So, if both championships are possible, should McLaren have moved Piastri aside at Monza?
“We did not consider that,” said Stella.
“We considered other ways during the race to make sure Lando had his own opportunities, but we didn’t consider the swap, because we were still willing to put as much pressure as possible on Leclerc to eventually induce him to have a problem with the front left like a lock-up in one of the chicanes.”
Norris said he had no interest in asking for Piastri to be moved aside because Norris is “not here to just beg for someone to let me pass”. But he did admit he would “love it” if McLaren and Piastri threw their weight behind Norris and his championship bid.
Back in Hungary, Norris eventually accepted a team instruction to let Piastri back past to win the race after having got ahead because of the way the team played its final pitstops.
At the time, this writer was convinced this was the right call. The logic was that Norris would get back more than the seven points ‘lost’ there by having McLaren and Piastri on side for the rest of the season.
Inevitably, there have been questions about this after Monza, along the lines of ‘isn’t this where Norris was meant to get the reward?’.
But what happened in Hungary didn’t mean McLaren would have to prioritise Norris at any cost every time the two are near each other on track between then and the end of the season.
What McLaren owes Norris first and foremost in these situations is to give him every opportunity to come back at Piastri during a race he’s behind in. And he was given that at Monza - he just couldn’t do it.
Norris hasn’t really earned anything more than that. The drivers that have occasionally had such help in the past certainly haven’t needed it as regularly as Norris in recent races. It’s only once in the last four races where Norris has been conclusively better than Piastri and beaten him on merit.
Handling the team dynamic poorly in such circumstances could still do needless damage to the Piastri relationship and if Norris isn’t quick enough to capitalise anyway, then McLaren could be creating more trouble for itself.
What if it moved Norris ahead at Monza and he couldn’t catch Leclerc and came under pressure from Piastri anyway? What if McLaren faffed around costing Piastri race time letting Norris by and up ahead Leclerc made a costly mistake that lost him the two-second margin he ultimately beat Piastri by?
If Norris was at his Zandvoort level week in, week out, it’s a different conversation. But this inconsistency shows why McLaren couldn’t just prioritise Norris from the off.
It is finally being swayed by the circumstances of the championship, and particularly Red Bull’s struggles, rather than Norris being so good he is maximising his points every weekend - and just needs his team’s help from time to time.
Norris even admitted himself that the easiest way around all of this is he starts ahead and finishes ahead. He can’t just expect to be bailed out by his team, and to be fair to him he doesn’t seem to, so others shouldn’t expect it either.
WHAT’S GOING TO CHANGE
After Zandvoort, Stella reiterated that it wouldn’t be a healthy way to run the team to just give all the “favours” to the ‘number one’ driver. But he did say that McLaren would take it race by race and in the “50-50 situations” or in cases where “Lando may need a bit of extra support from the team, we are going to give it”.
He said that includes utilising Piastri as a support act, but would draw the line at something that is not “reasonable” to him - he needs to be in agreement. And it sounds like McLaren is now at the point where it needs to have that discussion about when/where/how Piastri needs to back Norris or Norris needs to be favoured.
Norris came into the final 10 rounds after the summer break needing to average eight points more than Verstappen per event to steal the title. He’s managed that at Zandvoort and Monza, even though McLaren has slightly underachieved across those races, and hacking away bigger chunks going forward seems a distinct possibility now.
McLaren’s pre-race conversations at Monza already acknowledged that Norris is in the best position in the championship, which “defines our rules of engagement” – that’s what Stella said. But that still didn’t mean prioritising Norris at all costs.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, that we conclude in Turn 4 that Lando just braked too early and Oscar kind of measured it and the possibility to take the lead, then what does it mean if you are number one, you swap the lap after?” Stella posed.
“It’s just very difficult to implement the definition [of number one and number two] in the real world.
“It’s better to keep working as a team, get the opinion of both drivers and then work together to try to pursue this objective in both championships, because it now looks like the drivers’ championship is definitely a possibility.
“We were a little cautious, even before Monza, but now we can see that McLaren can compete at circuits where last year we were not competitive.
“It is a very competitive package overall and this could be a very important weapon for Lando in particular in the quest for the championship.”
It seems this race solidified the view that ‘right, Norris is going to need our help, and Red Bull really is in trouble’ - but the circumstances of the race weren’t conducive to acting the way the team wants to.
McLaren doesn’t want to do a blunt ‘Piastri, move aside please’ (it almost sounds like now it would prefer to try and give Norris the undercut to get ahead, which ironically was what accidentally happened in Hungary!).
It also can’t afford to just burn Piastri’s race for the sake of helping Norris, because the constructors’ championship is massively important, and McLaren can’t afford to drop points with one of its cars by punting on a long-shot drivers’ title for the other.
“Without Leclerc, Lando and Oscar would have been close enough that we could have played with some other variables,” Stella said of this race.
“That does not necessarily mean that now we swap positions. At least this wasn’t part of our agreement. It looks a little brutal if you ask a driver who is going to win a race he gained on track [himself] that you have to swap positions.
“But we will review all these things for the next races and if we come to the conclusion together that swapping is the right thing to do, then we will do it.”
It seems inevitable that McLaren will use this small gap in the calendar to establish some more ‘rules’ that Piastri will be asked to agree to, outlining more specific circumstances he may be expected to help Norris in, and how.
What they will be, we will likely only discover when Norris next needs Piastri’s assistance to gain more points. Returning to what happened in Hungary, McLaren and Piastri do owe Norris that assistance in the right circumstances.
But if Norris is to be a worthy world champion, he also needs to rely on the help as little as possible.
