Andrea Stella offers McLaren team orders verdict after Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri clash

Following Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s clash in Canada, might McLaren reconsider its approach to applying team orders?

Norris retired from fifth place in Montreal, after hitting the back of Piastri’s McLaren as the pair fought over fourth place in the final laps of the Canadian Grand Prix.

Andrea Stella: Canada clash will reinforce McLaren principles

With Norris and Piastri each chasing their maiden F1 championship titles following McLaren’s ascendancy to the front of the grid in the last year, the Woking-based squad has been reluctant to impose team orders on either.

So-called ‘papaya rules’ came into existence during the F1 2024 campaign, with team orders eventually seeing Piastri settle into a supporting role as his chances of a title dwindled in his sophomore year, with Norris’ extra experience seeing him take the battle to Verstappen for longer.

However, the reality of this equality was evident on days such as at the Hungarian Grand Prix, where Norris was instructed to give up his lead to Piastri despite the cost to him in the title fight, while the Australian’s elbows-out racing in Italy cost Norris further points.

Piastri’s support in the latter stages of the year proved invaluable to Norris, however, and their friendly cooperation as team-mates has continued into this season.

What has changed over the winter is Piastri’s competitiveness, however, with the increasingly experienced Australian now a capable match for Norris as he had opened up a 10-point lead, with multiple victories, heading into the Canadian Grand Prix.

The Montreal clash has extended this lead to 22 points and the threat of it destabilising the team’s harmony immediately vanished as Norris held his hands up to express his culpability and immediately sought out Piastri to apologise – a gesture which was welcomed and praised by the 24-year-old.

With Norris also apologising to McLaren, having not only cost himself dearly in the Drivers’ Championship but McLaren a further 10 points in the Constructors’, the topic of team orders came up as Stella spoke to media after the chequered flag.

“The being free to race and the being clear as to how we go racing is a value of racing, and it’s a value of racing that we want to try and exercise and respect as much as we can,” he said when asked if McLaren could review its hands-off approach to team orders if the drivers can’t race cleanly.

The Montreal clash comes just a few weeks after Norris overtook Piastri around the outside into Turn 1 at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in a move which could have risked both drivers’ podium finishes, a move that solidified McLaren’s desire to maintain parity between its drivers.

“Rather than every time that we have proximity between the two cars, then having control from the pit wall. [Racing] like that, racing may soon become a bit of an artifact,” Stella continued.

“We want to give Lando and Oscar opportunities to race and opportunities to be, at the end of the season, in the position that they deserve to be in based on their merit, based on their performance, and the racing quality that they have expressed through the season.

“Rather than being at the end of the season and realising that the points have been controlled more by the team, rather than the quality of their driving.

“This is not necessarily a simple and straight exercise, but we want to try and do it as as best as we can.

“So I don’t foresee that today’s episode will change our approach from this point of view – if anything, it will reinforce and strengthen that the principles we have requires more caution by our drivers.

“Because, if we say that there should be no contact between the two McLarens, we need to have the margins to make sure that we have no contact – even if in a DRS situation, the car may get almost a little bit sucked onto the other car and cause this kind of misjudgement as to the distance.”

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Stella’s comments come shortly after CEO Zak Brown told PlanetF1.com that he is “comfortable” with the hypothetical scenario of McLaren losing the drivers’ title outright, rather than abandon their fair and equitable in its treatment of Norris and Piastri.

“I’m comfortable with that because the other scenario is, how do you take a driver out of the championship that’s competing for the championship? That’s not right at all,” he said.

“If you had a second driver that wasn’t competing for the championship, then I get it; sacrifice [Yuki] Tsunoda’s qualifying because he’s giving Max a tow or whatever.

“I get compromising the second car at Red Bull because it’s not competing for the Drivers’ Championship, so it’s an easy decision to make.

“But when you’ve got two drivers first and second in the championship and are separated by less than one second-place finish, how do you possibly even consider standing one down into a supporting role?

“There’s just no way we will.”

The clash on Lap 67 of the Canadian Grand Prix represented something of a situation akin to ripping a band-aid off – a scenario that’s been brewing for a long time, given the proximity of the two drivers on track at any given Grand Prix.

Having had the seemingly inevitable clash happen, and seeing his two drivers get through it without animosity, Stella said McLaren has learned an invaluable lesson that can now be taken forward.

“We said a few times that it wasn’t a matter of if, it was more a matter of when, and the when is Canada 2025,” he said.

“We never want to see the two McLarens having contact. This is part of our principles. We saw it today.

“This is just a result of a miscalculation, a misjudgement from a racing point of view, which obviously should not happen, but, at the same time, is part of racing.

“We did appreciate the fact that Lando immediately owned the situation, raised his hand, and took responsibility for the accident.

“He apologised immediately to the team. He came to apologise to me as team principal in order to apologise to the entire team.

“It’s important the way we respond and we react to these situations, which ultimately will be a very important learning point.

“I don’t think it’s learning from a theoretical point of view, because the principle was already there, but it’s learning in terms of experiencing how painful these situations can be, and this will only make us stronger in terms of our internal competition and in terms of the way we go racing.”

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