Italian GP conclusions: McLaren team orders, Norris and Piastri puppets, Verstappen’s little victories

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen claimed his third victory of the F1 2025 season at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Verstappen dominated from pole position to end an eight-race winless streak, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri second and third respectively after McLaren’s latest team orders controversy. Here are our conclusions from Italy…

McLaren is determined to stage manage Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris

There is one important distinction between Hungary 2024 and what unfolded in the closing laps at Monza on Sunday.

The moment Lando Norris’s left-front wheel failed to attach at the first attempt was the moment this stopped being a McLaren thing and instead became one of those things. A racing incident, to borrow a phrase.

It was, in other words, not Oscar Piastri’s responsibility to dig his teammate out of that hole.

Yet still the pit wall asked anyway. And Piastri – more fool him – obliged.

It was not the first time across the Italian Grand Prix weekend that McLaren asked too much of Piastri.

When Norris was at risk of being eliminated from Q2 on Saturday, having lost his first lap by locking up and cutting the first chicane, Piastri was asked over team radio if he could “help Lando” and “tow Lando up to Turn 4.”

Once again, the sticky situation in which Norris found himself in qualifying had nothing to do with his teammate.

Yet still the pit wall asked anyway. And Piastri – more fool him – obliged.

Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris: McLaren head-to-head scores for F1 2025

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

Quite something, isn’t it, for a team to request that a driver give his direct title rival a helping hand to ensure that he made it through to Q3?

Especially when a Q2 exit for Lando, less than a week after his retirement at Zandvoort, would have taken Piastri another step closer to a maiden world championship.

This, though, is the problem McLaren has created for itself in 2025.

For all its determination to avoid interfering in the fight between Piastri and Norris, McLaren did exactly that – twice – at Monza.

The team did precisely what it vowed never to do earlier in the season, taking points out of one driver’s hands and handing them straight to the other.

When Norris moved aside for Piastri in Hungary last year, there was some hope that Oscar, if ever presented with the same situation, would tell McLaren exactly where to stick its papaya rules.

This, after all, was the driver who had no problem turning his back on the organisation – Renault – that had funded much of his development to drive a McLaren in his debut season, ruthlessly positioning himself to have the most productive start to his career possible.

Be in no doubt that Piastri, like many of the great drivers in history, has a darker, selfish side too.

Yet there was Oscar, like Lando in Budapest, making his dissatisfaction plain over team radio but following the requests almost without question.

Little wonder that Max Verstappen, who once remarked that his father would have “kicked me in the nuts” if he followed Toro Rosso’s team order to swap places with Carlos Sainz at Singapore 2015, found it so amusing.

And what must Mark Webber, the Jos to Oscar’s Max, have thought of it, knowing as he does the importance of the psychological battleground and how such tiny margins can decide titles, as he watched Piastri let his main opponent off the hook?

Recap: How the Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris battle has ebbed and flowed

👉 Hungarian GP conclusions: Hamilton shock factor, Verstappen investigation, Piastri raises Norris

👉 Dutch GP conclusions: Piastri breaks Norris’s spirit, unavoidable Hadjar mistake, Hamilton’s realisation

There has been some debate over recent months about why the battle between Piastri and Norris, good-natured though it is, seems to lack the competitive edge and tension of previous title tilts between teammates.

The answer finally hit home at Monza: McLaren is determined to stage manage this fight every step of the way.

That policy extends, it seems, to surgically removing the backbone of both drivers and quashing all sense of independent thinking.

Title protagonists?

On this evidence, Norris and Piastri are more like puppets.

Max Verstappen’s target for the rest of F1 2025? Little victories

Little victories.

That’s what Gilles Villeneuve would rely on to sustain him through the tougher times, when the car was uncompetitive and regular wins were out of reach.

As long as he could climb out of his Ferrari cockpit at the end of each race – no, each session – and feel that he had extracted everything the car had to offer on that day in history, Villeneuve would consider it a job well done and himself a happy man.

It’s a similar situation Max Verstappen finds himself in the closing months of 2025.

This is an unusual position for him these days, to be so cut adrift of the title race (still he trails Oscar Piastri by 94 points even after his third victory of the year) with so much of the season left to run.

After being accustomed to so much success over recent years, there was always a danger that Max would not respond well when the victories – after more than a year of Red Bull wobbling – finally began to dry up, yet he has been a credit to his team.

And it is not as if he has not been bracing himself for a period like this for some time.

You might recall, for instance, that moments after climbing out of his all-conquering RB19 for the final time to conclude the most dominant season in history at Abu Dhabi 2023, Verstappen recognised that it would be “very hard to have another season like this.”

He has carried that realism – that awareness that success in sport comes in cycles and that, no, nobody can win everything all the time – into 2025, acknowledging recently that Red Bull has entered a rebuilding phase and vowing to guide the team through it.

He is almost certain to be dethroned at the end of 2025, the count paused – but surely not stopped – at four titles.

So what’s left for Max this season? Those little victories.

Weekends like Suzuka; moments like the first-corner pass on Piastri at Imola; the opportunistic pole positions in Jeddah, Miami, Silverstone; even the saves, those spectacular pieces of car control of which only he is capable, in Spain and Zandvoort.

His pole-to-flag win at Monza with the biggest winning margin enjoyed by any driver all year, and at a circuit where the Red Bull just did not work a year ago, is another little victory that will only add to the legend.

And remind the watching world that even if the title is destined to head elsewhere this season, Verstappen clearly remains the best out there.

Did Carlos Sainz back the wrong horse? The evidence is stacking up

In the uncertain period surrounding his future last year, Carlos Sainz was at least absolutely sure of one thing.

His next move, he frequently said in the first half of 2024, would be made only with the long term in mind, with no emphasis whatsoever placed on a team’s current results.

Yet that wasn’t quite true, was it? Not in the case of Sauber.

Because if Sainz wanted anything more than getting his next move right, it was to avoid a wasted season nailed to the back of the grid in 2025.

That’s the sort of situation – just ask Valtteri Bottas – that can blow out a driver’s spark, rot away his talent and lead to a potentially permanent drop in standards.

Yes, yes, yes, there was the promise of Audi and better days to come.

But before that, could Sainz stomach a full season – 24 races of total numbness – in the slowest car of all with no hope of scoring points?

Evidently not. Hence why his final decision ultimately came down to a straight choice between Williams and Alpine, both tellingly equipped with Mercedes engines for F1’s 2026 rules reset.

And it may be that, with Mercedes power on his side, everything finally clicks next season and his move to Williams proves an act of genius.

Yet Sainz would not be human if he did not glance at Gabriel Bortoleto’s car – the car he could so easily have been driving in 2025 – six places ahead of him on the grid at Monza and scoring points for the fourth time in the last six races, and wonder if he should have followed his father’s advice all along.

This was the weekend Sainz’s Williams career threatened to finally achieve lift off, Carlos classified no lower than third across Friday’s practice sessions and the car emerging as the clearest threat to the frontrunners.

At what has become a Williams circuit in recent times, however, both Sainz and Albon failed to even reach Q3 when it mattered, allowing the session to scamper away from them with a series of small mistakes.

Capped by a collision with Oliver Bearman’s Haas, Monza seemed to encapsulate Sainz’s Williams career so far – fleeting moments of promise, but very few concrete results and everything on the scrappy side.

The mistake he made in overlooking Sauber last year was underestimating the potential of the team to progress quickly, especially following the appointment of Jonathan Wheatley, one of the sharpest minds in the pit lane, as team principal.

It is no coincidence that the car Carlos turned up his nose at last year has become a regular Q3 contender and points scorer, a function of both upgrades and smarter decisions on the pit wall, since Wheatley officially started work at Sauber in April.

And with Mattia Binotto, who worshipped the ground Sainz walked on at Ferrari, combining his senior position with a technical role, Audi’s hopes for 2026 and beyond, particularly on the engine side, appear far healthier these days too.

Neither of these things should really come as a surprise to Sainz, whose move to Williams was announced seven days after the appointment of Binotto and three before that of Wheatley.

Perhaps his decision to sign that Williams contract, and so callously dismiss what Sauber and Audi had to offer, was more short sighted than he realised.

Alpine’s decision to drop Renault engines was not a mistake

It was at last year’s Italian Grand Prix that Renault workers, upset by the company’s move to repurpose its historic Viry-Chatillon F1 engine facility, staged a protest against the decision.

They could have picked a better race, in truth.

If there was one circuit on the calendar that was going to expose the true extent of Alpine’s power shortfall, after all, it was Monza.

And sure enough, both cars – neither classified higher than 14th all weekend – finished the race a lap down.

Talk about making the company’s point for it.

This year? Much the same, but worse.

If Liam Lawson had not abandoned his final Q1 lap, Pierre Gasly – one of the best-performing drivers this season – would have ended qualifying as the only car incapable of clearing the 1m20s barrier on pure pace, with Franco Colapinto only marginally quicker in 18th place.

Gasly went on to describe that as “still a good effort” considering how badly Alpine had struggled on Friday. Zut alors!

Whatever the reasoning behind the decision to drop its in-house engine – and many still regard it as the first concrete step towards a full sale of the F1 team, making any future transaction less complex – it is increasingly clear that it was not a mistake.

If Renault has struggled so badly for more than a decade under the current engine regulations (the current PU is estimated to cost Alpine around 0.3s per lap on average and has been a source of frustration for Gasly all season), what chance did it really have of mastering the challenges of the more-complex-than-ever 2026 rules?

You can see Flavio Briatore’s logic in favouring a Mercedes customer deal for an overnight performance gain and giving the race team one less thing to worry about in the process.

Given its detached position in the constructors’ standings, the sudden resignation of its team principal earlier this season and the constant uncertainty surrounding its driver lineup, there is a temptation to view Alpine as F1’s crisis team with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Yet there is still one helluva team, a team more than capable of winning races, just waiting to break out at Enstone.

And if the Mercedes power unit is half as good as so many expect, that potential should be far easier to notice in 2026.

A reminder of what Carlos Sainz, perhaps silently ruing another missed opportunity on the driver market, said back in Bahrain: “Have you seen how quick that Alpine is in Turns 6 and 11?

“It’s as quick as a McLaren through those corners.

“They say they are 0.3s down on engine. With a Mercedes engine, it would be on the front row!”

Shorter races are not the answer to F1’s entertainment problem

So how did you find it, then? The fastest race in F1 history? And only 24 hours after the fastest lap in history?

Didn’t feel that way, though, did it?

However fast it might have been – one hour, 13 minutes and 24.325 seconds to be precise – the Italian Grand Prix actually felt like a bit of a drag to sit through.

Certainly, the more exciting races of this season (Melbourne, Silverstone, Zandvoort spring to mind as the best of a pretty bad bunch) seemed to pass by a little bit faster.

How ironic that the quickest race the sport has ever produced should prove such a borefest in the week that Stefano Domenicali, the Formula 1 chief executive, proposed shorter races as the solution to F1’s entertainment problem.

Why’s that?

Ah, of course: the “younger audiences.”

Yet it is not as if the sprint races have been a roaring, thrill-a-minute success since their introduction in 2021 either, no matter how much the television pundits try to convince us otherwise.

Domenicali is the merely the latest in a long line of executives in sport – see also the suggestion of Florentino Perez, the Real Madrid president, to reduce the length of matches in football/soccer for the benefit of younger folk in 2021 – to miss the point entirely.

Such gimmicks should always take a backseat to steps to improve the core product.

In an F1 context, that might mean such radical ideas as putting an end to the days of one team dominating after another, generating more competition so every team has a shot at the podium and, y’know, bringing back engines people actually enjoy listening to.

Then you might have more people more willing to sit through an entire race from lights to flag.

Not exactly rocket science, is it?

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