From Friday, after securing his first place on the starting grid of the sprint race, Oscar Piastri said he was ready to play Lando Norris's game and step aside to help him take more points in his fight with Max Verstappen for the world championship.
The question of team instructions was debated as early as the Hungarian GP, where Piastri was finally able to achieve his first success in F1, while Norris had taken the advantage thanks to an offbeat strategy. At a time when Norris was further behind than today, McLaren felt he was “too early” to designate a leader.
Piastri is not mathematically excluded from the fight for the world crown but the situation has changed, particularly after an Italian GP where the absence of teamwork may have cost the British clan victory. Since then, McLaren assumed to give priority to Norris but the opportunities to see Piastri directly help him remained rare, between an Azerbaijan GP which saw Norris eliminated in Q1, and two difficult races for his teammate in Austin then in Mexico .
This Saturday, with the two cars on the front row, the question was naturally raised before the sprint. Andrea Stella accepts having to manage the delicate question of instructions and even prefers to congratulate herself on it, being confronted with such a dilemma ultimately being a luxury.
“It's natural to make life complicated, because when you have two drivers who can win races and a car that can win races, the first thing you have to accept is that there is no easy solution”explained the boss of the McLaren team to Motorsport.com. “This already puts you in a good frame of mind to manage potential difficulties. But as I have said in the past, we are working hard to put ourselves in this difficult situation. We have to put the elements in place for that and we are all on the same line: the team, the drivers.”
Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris
Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images
“I always tell drivers that this is the hardest thing we face in our career. It's the one thing we can't face with converging goals. That being said, we still have good conversations, based on our principles, which are to take the most points for the championship by being as fair as possible with both drivers.”
An instruction that was slow to be implemented
McLaren, however, gave the impression of taking risks for a large part of the sprint. Piastri maintained the advantage ahead of Norris at the start of the race and the two men seemed to perform better than Charles Leclerc, then third. McLaren, however, felt that swapping positions so early could complicate Piastri's race and preferred to wait.
The Australian only gave up the lead to his teammate just before a Virtual Safety Car at the end of the race. Although he had to hold off Verstappen when the race was restarted, Stella believes it was difficult to give Norris the lead earlier.
“We knew we wanted to swap positions, but we were waiting to have the right gap behind Lando, because if we swap and the other car is threatened by DRS, we could compromise one of the cars. [nos] principles, namely the maximum result for the team. So we observed, ideally we waited until we had a few seconds [d’avance]for a few laps.”
VIDEO – Oscar Piastri steps aside in front of Lando Norris
“Finally, when it was two seconds, on the next lap it was 1”2, so we were waiting for the right opportunity. We don't want to do that and generate a situation that doesn't maximize the result for the team. We knew we had time, except with the safety car risk. As soon as we saw the risk of a safety car towards the end of the race, we had to speed up the process.
Stella acknowledged that there was “maybe” an opportunity to exchange positions earlier, but his pilots did not have sufficient lead: “As I said, the gaps were moving a bit in the sectors and I wasn't totally comfortable with the idea of exposing Oscar to [la menace de] Leclerc, since at one point Leclerc was not slow at all, at the beginning. We can see a gap of two seconds but there is also a sequence of events.”
Comments collected by Jonathan Noble
