McLaren is stuck in a title mess of its own making. Piastri is the problem… and the solution

No team can ever be happy to turn a front-row lockout into a two-three finish, but McLaren has particular reason to feel disappointed that victory slipped through its fingers in Monza at the weekend.

The race couldn’t have been set up any better. With Lando Norris on pole and Oscar Piastri alongside him, McLaren was poised to deal maximum damage to Red Bull Racing, which slumped to seventh and eighth on the grid with Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez.

Finish where they started and McLaren would walk away with the constructors championship lead and with Norris having taken a big bite out of Verstappen’s hefty points advantage.

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But instead it fumbled, tripped up by its attempts to manage an increasingly complicated dynamic between its two race-winning drivers.

Things went wrong immediately off the line.

Norris’s attempt to cover the fast-starting Piastri left the race line open to the Australian, who used it to get the perfect run up to the Roggia chicane, where the Briton again inexplicably left the door wide open.

Piastri didn’t need asking to barge through, making a gutsy around-the-outside move to take the lead.

Caught by surprise, Norris then dropped another place to Charles Leclerc.

“He got way too close for comfort,” Norris complained later to Sky Sports. “We both easily could’ve been out in that corner if I’d braked one metre later.

“Obviously if I could rewind, I’d do stuff slightly differently, but it is what it is.”

Piastri stood his ground when asked for a response.

“I thought it was a good move,” he argued. “I broke late and left plenty of space and we got through unscathed.

“I knew I had to do that to try and give myself the best chance to win the race, so for me it was good.”

It would be decisive to the race outcome. McLaren became preoccupied with strategising Norris past Leclerc, and once he undercut his way back into second, he and Piastri were allowed to thrash their tyres in what they assumed was a private battle for victory.

The Scuderia ruthlessly exploited that false assumption, with Leclerc nailing his one-stop strategy to punish McLaren for taking its eyes off the ball.

With Verstappen gaining only one place in the race and Pérez remaining where he started, the points swing was still reasonable. McLaren is now just eight points adrift of the teams title, while Norris reduced his deficit to 62 points.

But not for the first time this year, McLaren walked away from a race with so much more left on the table.

With eight rounds to go and the drivers championship on the line, McLaren must grapple with some hard questions about how it wants to deal with its long-running philosophy of having two number one drivers in its stable.

PAPAYA RULES

McLaren had been expected to back Norris as its lead driver in Italy given his narrow but viable path to the drivers championship, but on Sunday we discovered instead that the team had come up with a set of guidelines it called the ‘papaya rules’, which Norris and Piastri were told several times throughout the race to obey.

“The papaya rules are: it’s your teammate. Race them hard. Race them clean. Don’t touch,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown explained to Sky Sports.

It sounds simple enough, and Piastri certainly appeared to abide by the code. Undoubtedly he was racing hard, but at no point was contact made.

And yet both Brown and team principal Andrea Stella said several times that the overtake would need to be forensically analysed in the next fortnight for compliance with the rules.

“In terms of expectation and the impression of the drivers and also the overtaking itself, we will have to take a look with some calm, have a review together with them, and then we will assess the situation, and if there are any learning to take from that, we will take it for the future,” Stella told Sky Sports.

Together the team bosses gave the distinct impression that their papaya rules hadn’t engineered the desired outcome.

The team chose not to designate Norris as the number one, hoping — perhaps assuming — instead that the Briton would go out and win the position for himself. Taking pole was a great start; if he could cover Piastri in the opening stint on Sunday, the race would naturally unfold to his benefit, and McLaren would be free to prioritise him ahead of his teammate as a matter of course.

“The easiest thing would’ve been for Lando to just run away with it and then not put difficult positions on pit wall,” Brown said.

But Piastri appeared to take only one thing from the plan: that there were no team orders and he was free to race.

So he went racing, and — as per the papaya rules — went racing hard.

He ruthlessly took advantage of Norris’s first lap problems to line himself up for that move into the Roggia chicane, totally dismissing Norris’s limp middle-of-the-road defending in the process.

Tough? Yes. But that’s what made it great racing.

The team chose not to make it incumbent on Piastri to support his teammate. The outcome was that Piastri went out to make a statement by winning the race for himself.

NORRIS ISN’T SEIZING HIS CHANCES

It’s not the first time this year Norris has failed to grab his chances, and that must have McLaren doubting whether the Briton can make the most of what would be a significant call to back him over Piastri.

Remember: at 62 points down with eight rounds remaining, Norris would need to outscore Verstappen by an average of 7.75 points per weekend to pinch the lead in Abu Dhabi.

That boils down to finishing first to Verstappen in second in every race and sprint with at least three points for fastest laps.

It’s clearly possible, and Red Bull Racing’s relatively stinking recent form shortens the odds of McLaren pulling it off — Norris outscored Verstappen by eight points this weekend by finishing third ahead of the Dutchman in sixth.

But while talk so far has been dominated by how Piastri could put additional space between Norris and Verstappen, comparatively little has been said of Norris getting ahead of Piastri and Verstappen in the first place.

Take his unenviable 100 per cent record of failure in converting poles in sprints or grands prix into the lead at the end of the first lap.

Victory hasn’t always been possible when Norris has started from pole, and not all those failures to convert have been solely his fault, but just this year alone that streak has cost him three wins.

He comfortably had the pace in Spain to beat Verstappen but was forced to play catch-up after being after being beaten from the line.

In Hungary his slow start allowed Piastri to lead home McLaren’s first one-two finish in three years,

Now this weekend his underwhelming defending against a motivated Piastri cost him two places in a matter of corner, which knocked on to depriving his team of a crucial strategic advantage that boxed him and Piastri into a two-stop strategy that would be beaten by Leclerc’s gutsy one-stop race.

McLaren wants Norris to make the call easy to make with form that identified him as the undeniable team leader. So far he’s failed to do that.

THE FORM GUIDE DOESN’T FAVOUR EITHER DRIVER

Norris’s fumbles are only half of the equation. The other half is Piastri’s growing power inside the team.

Consider the split of races at which one or the other has led the team.

Races in which Norris had the advantage (8): Bahrain, Australia, Japan, China, Canada, Spain, Austria, Netherlands.

Races Piastri had the advantage (7): Saudi Arabia, Miami, Emilia-Romagna, Monaco, Hungary, Belgium, Italy.

In doubt (1): Great Britain.

The division of races is close to even, but there are three grands prix in Piastri’s column at which the Australian lost significant points to Norris due to bad luck or team error.

Considering its points, not form, that are the basis of Norris’s bid to become McLaren’s number one, those three races are important.

Piastri was comfortably the better driver in Miami despite not having the complete upgrade package that totally revolutionised McLaren’s season. He was running second behind Verstappen and should have been the one to challenge him for victory had the timing of the safety car fallen in his favour rather than Norris’s. Instead he fell back into the pack and was punted out of the race by Carlos Sainz.

In Emilia-Romagna a team mistake in qualifying had Piastri slapped with a grid penalty for impeding after qualifying second. Norris inherited the position and finished there, while Piastri finished fourth.

At the weekend in Italy a strategic error from the team turned what should have been a nailed-on victory into another second place.

Those represent swings of 32 points, nine points and four points respectively, adding up to a total swing of 45 points against Piastri.

He trails Norris by only 44 points.

Of course hypotheticals are dangerous for the scope to infinitely hypothesise about potential outcomes — Norris, for example, lost at least 18 points in Austria in his crash with Max Verstappen — but this serves to illustrate that the competitive picture between the two McLaren drivers is closer than it might first seem and is getting closer all the time.

While the question of team orders might stack up on the current points tally, it doesn’t on current form.

WHERE DOES THE TEAM GO FROM HERE?

But it’s not the relative form of the drivers that’s set to force McLaren’s hand; it’s the form of Red Bull Racing after its shocking Italian Grand Prix that will have it finally make the call.

Norris’s odds were long when Red Bull Racing still looked like comfortably the second-best car. In Italy it was a distant fourth fastest behind McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes.

If it’s similarly uncompetitive at even a few of the last eight races, Norris’s odds will shorten massively — and the argument that McLaren should back him will strengthen enormously.

“It now looks like the drivers championship is definitely a possibility,” Stella admitted per Autosport.

“We are fighting Max Verstappen, so I think if we want to give support to one driver, we definitely have to pick the one that is in the best position.

“If anything with Lando, we need to adjust some little racing things which may help him.”

Even rival teams agree this is the logical course of action.

“You are between a rock and a hard place,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said, per Autosport. “On one side they are racers like we are racers. We want to make sure that the best man wins.

“But on the other side when it starts to become dysfunctional and impacting your team performance, then how do you react to that?

“The team is always on the losing end because if you freeze positions and have team orders, then you have maybe not what our racing soul wants to do, but the rational side needs to prevail.

“At the end you don’t want to lose out on a championship by three or five points that you could have easily made.

“I think they are going to come to some conclusion after this race.”

After all, that racing soul cuts both ways. McLaren might cherish its philosophy of having two number one drivers, but such even-handedness is useless if neither can win the drivers championship.

It will be harsh on Piastri, whose performances this year have earnt him equal status at McLaren.

But Stella urged the 23-year-old to see it not as a blow to his prestige but as a crucial building-block to a future title tilt of his own.

“If you support your teammate winning the championship, for the team it is a big boost,” Stella said, per the BBC. “If we win both titles, it is a massive boost, and he benefits from a big boost to the team, even if he is the other driver.

“Because we don’t have to forget Oscar is in the middle of his second season of F1. The future is Oscar’s.

“He needs to make sure when it is the time to support, the support he gives to the team and Lando, for him is an investment.”

Next time McLaren is in contention for the individual championship, Piastri will be undeniable as the driver to lead it there.