Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has weighed in on McLaren’s controversial driver swap at the F1 Italian GP as Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris continue to compete in the two-way race for the Drivers’ Championship.
The Austrian reckons that McLaren’s decision to instruct Piastri to relinquish his place after a slow pit stop for Norris at Monza has set a troublesome new precedent for the sport.
How did McLaren find themselves in the middle of another team orders controversy?
After qualifying in the top three behind pole-sitter Max Verstappen, Norris and Piastri were on course to take the chequered flag in second and third positions, respectively, in Sunday’s race.
Extending their first stint on the mediums considerably, McLaren finally decided to bring their cars in with only 8 laps to go. The team asked Norris whether he would prefer to pit before or after his teammate. He agreed to go second as long as there was no risk of the Australian undercutting him.
Accordingly, McLaren allowed Piastri to make his only pit stop before Norris on Lap 45 to help preserve his gap to Charles Leclerc in P4. The pit crew pulled off his stop without a hitch in 1.9 seconds.
However, a problem with the left-front wheel resulted in a 5.9s stop when Norris switched to the soft tyres on the subsequent lap. As he rejoined the track, Piastri swept past and moved into second place, thereby embroiling the Woking-based outfit in yet another team orders controversy.
McLaren promptly intervened to neutralise Norris’s pit stop misfortune and ordered Piastri to let the Brit past again. In order to persuade the hesitant Australian, the team referred to last year’s Hungarian GP, where Norris belatedly gave back the lead to Piastri after gaining it due to a powerful undercut.
Even though the two cars were free to race to the finish, Piastri didn’t have enough pace in hand to strike back. Ultimately, the Melbourne native crossed the line in third, just 2.144s behind his teammate and championship rival.
While Piastri conceded afterwards that the swap was “a fair request”, Norris defended the team’s approach to racing. Andrea Stella also shared a similar opinion, maintaining that the call was “a matter of consistency” with McLaren’s inherent principles.
Wolff curious to see how McLaren precedent pans out
Speaking in a print media session after the F1 race, Toto Wolff remarked that McLaren’s contentious driver swap in the closing stages of the Italian GP has set a new precedent that they would find rather challenging to manage.
Emphasising that there are merits on both sides of the argument, the Mercedes team boss admitted that he is intrigued to see how things unfold as the title fight further intensifies over the season’s final eight race weekends.
“There’s no right and there’s no wrong, and I’m curious to see how that pans out.
“You set a precedent that is very difficult to undo. What if the team does another mistake and it’s not a pit stop, do you switch them around? But then equally, because of a team mistake, making a driver that is trying to catch up lose the points is not fair either.
“So, I think we are going to get our response of whether that was right today towards the end of the season when it heats up.”
McLaren have opened a can of worms
McLaren’s directive to reverse positions on Sunday meant that Norris cut down Piastri’s lead in the championship standings to 31 points. Had the team not intervened, the Brit would’ve left Monza 37 points adrift, right after losing crucial 18 points due to a car failure in Zandvoort.
Reiterating that there are no easy solutions to this conundrum, Toto Wolff nonetheless surmised that McLaren’s latest team orders at the F1 Italian GP have opened the possibility of numerous new scenarios being used to force the team’s hand in a closely contested championship battle.
“There’s no clear-cut answer for today. The answer with managing it that way will come towards the end of the season, if it’s going to get more fierce.
“If the team made a mistake, the team inverted positions, an absolutely fair decision.
“On the other side, what is a team mistake? What if next time around the car doesn’t start up and you lose a position or whatever, or the suspension breaks? What do you do then in the next one?
“So, you could have a cascade of events or precedents that can be very difficult to manage.”
Wolff’s advice for McLaren management
Toto Wolff is certainly not a novice when it comes to managing highly competitive teammates. The Austrian found himself in the middle of an infamously vicious intra-team rivalry at Mercedes when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg went toe-to-toe for world titles in 2014-2016.
Referring to the Silver War in a media session after Sunday’s Italian GP, Wolff proclaimed that a well-defined policy would be paramount to McLaren handling the drivers fairly as Piastri and Norris duke it out on the track in the remaining eight rounds.
“But I can only speak of how we found ourselves in this situation back [in] all those years that we had to manage.
“And I think most important is to have a clear strategy. You either go like this or you go the other way around. Either let them race or try to balance it in the most possible fair way.”
Wolff would’ve handled the Hamilton vs Rosberg rivalry differently now
With McLaren boasting a massive gap of 337 to their next-best rival, Ferrari, the Woking-based squad can secure the Constructors’ Championship as early as the next race in Azerbaijan. In a similar manner, Mercedes let the Hamilton vs Rosberg rivalry play out in campaigns in which the team’s title aspirations were never at risk from early in the season.
Acknowledging that the opportunity to decide on such intra-team rules of engagement is a luxury the majority of the current F1 grid cannot afford, Toto Wolff confessed that he would manage the particularly hostile 2016 title campaign differently if he could turn back the wheel of time.
“I think if I look at our situations, because I’m not in the shoes of McLaren, back in the day, we had a gap where a Constructors’ Championship is guaranteed, and you just let them race but within the spirit, you race fair and square but don’t touch.
“If you touch, then we take control.
“That’s what I would’ve done in 2016, rather than trying to overmanage with our racing intent.”
However, Wolff noted one major difference between the situation he had encountered back then and the one his McLaren counterparts are experiencing now, as Piastri complied with the team order to let Norris by and moved over on Lap 49 of the F1 Italian GP.
Highlighting how Hamilton and Rosberg refused to give an inch to each other, the 53-year-old claimed that McLaren, in comparison, have two far more cooperative drivers in their employ.
“We had two different animals in the car in Lewis [Hamilton] and Nico [Rosberg]. They were two assassins, fierce combatants that took no prisoners, racing against each other.
“At times, it was very difficult to bench for the team. I don’t see that at McLaren.”
