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This Formula 1 title fight between McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri just refuses to get nasty, even when the team find themselves embroiled in controversy of their own making.
The Italian Grand Prix threw up the sort of situation that in many – if not most – cases in F1 would be expected to generate acrimony.
For most of the race, Norris and Piastri ran second and third behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, the Dutchman too fast for Norris, and Norris too fast for Piastri.
But in throwing the strategy dice by running their cars as long as possible before a pit stop, and then deciding to stop them in the ‘wrong’ order, McLaren generated a problem for themselves.
Piastri was stopped first, when normally in that situation it would be Norris. The Briton said it was fine as long as it did not lead to Piastri ending up ahead of him. The team reassured him it would not.
But it did. In theory, Norris had a gap more than big enough to stop and re-emerge in front. But he had a problem at his pit stop, and came out behind his team-mate.
The team asked Piastri to let him back past. The Australian said he didn’t understand but agreed anyway, and they finished Norris-Piastri, the latter’s championship lead down by three points to 31.
This very much did not go as would have been expected in previous intra-team title fights.
The typical sort of response to this situation would be for a driver in Piastri’s position to refuse to let his team-mate back past. Or to take a lot longer to do it, while complaining vociferously. Or criticise the team afterwards.
It’s clear how the winner of the race would have responded if he was in that situation.
“Hah,” Verstappen said when told about the swap. “Just because they had a slow stop?”
But then McLaren are very much not running their team in the normal way.
By:BBC Sports
