‘You’ve got to be selfish’: The big risk to McLaren harmony one year on from Piastri’s first win

Oscar Piastri won his first grand prix 12 months ago at the Hungarian Grand Prix, and the Formula 1 landscape has changed irrevocably ever since.

It isn’t just that Piastri, long heralded as a champion in waiting, finally got his name onto coveted list of grand prix winners. It’s what that moment represented for the sport.

Piastri followed Lando Norris to McLaren’s first front-row lockout in 12 years. On Sunday he led the team’s second one-two finish in more than a decade.

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It was the McLaren’s second victory of the season after a long run of highly competitive races. It had been nibbling away at Red Bull Racing’s championship advantage, but Hungary had seen it take a big bite out of the stalled giant’s status as title leader.

Norris, despite finishing second, was even being whispered about as a potential drivers championship contender.

The culmination was the dawn of a new reality. McLaren was no longer Formula 1’s rising team, and its drivers were no longer the next generation of winners. They had arrived as the sport’s new leaders.

And they’d done it earlier than expected. McLaren management had targeted 2025 for its first wins and the rule changes in 2026 as a possible return to title contention.

While Norris’s title challenge never eventuated, by the end of the season McLaren had won its first constructors world championship in 26 years.

But the aftermath of that landmark day wasn’t absorbed by the team’s breakthrough domination or Piastri’s debut victory.

Instead it was dominated by the way the entire occasion was almost blown up by a moment of intransigence that thrust McLaren headlong into the pitfalls of success.

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‘YOU’VE GOT TO THINK OF YOURSELF’

By the time Norris had led Piastri to a front-row lockout, both he and the team had developed a reputation for wasting chances.

McLaren’s big step forward in Miami in May had propelled Norris to his maiden victory, but what followed was a litany of missed opportunities in the form of four podiums from the next six races, among them several shots at victory.

With Max Verstappen a close third on the grid, pervasive was the pessimistic assumption that McLaren would find a way to squander its advantage.

Instead the threat came from within.

Piastri got the better start to take the inside line on the run down to the first turn. Norris tried to squeeze him, but the Australian ruthlessly ran him to the edge of the road to take the place.

With Piastri keeping a handle on his teammate from the front — bar a wide moment that temporarily brought Norris back into range — McLaren’s only concern was to lock down a one-two finish.

So when Lewis Hamilton, then up to a distant third, opened the second pit stop window, the team jumped to cover him with Norris first, who was most exposed to a possible undercut.

Piastri stopped a lap later and rejoined second behind Norris, who had gained an incidental undercut himself form the defensive strategy.

The team hadn’t given the internal undercut a second thought, knowing the drivers could always be swapped back. In their 18 months as teammates — and in Norris previous years with the team too — neither driver had ever ignored a team order. The Englishman’s obedience was assumed.

But then he stopped responding to radio calls.

Lap after lap his race engineer, Will Joseph, called on his driver to swap with Piastri to retore their pre-stop order. Eventually Norris responded to argue that he should be allowed to keep the lead.

The communications became increasingly desperate as Joseph attempted to reason with his driver’s better angels.

“The way to win a championship is not by yourself,” he pleaded. “You’re going to need Oscar and you’re going to need the team.”

Eventually Norris acquiesced, dramatically slowing on the front straight to let his teammate fly past with three laps to go.

“Things are always going to go through your mind because you’ve got to be selfish in this sport at times,” Norris said. “You’ve got to think of yourself. That’s priority number one, is think of yourself.

“I’m also a team player, so my mind was going pretty crazy at the time.

“So it was not easy, but I also understood the situation I was in, and I was quite confident always by the last lap I would have done it.”

It was an illuminating glimpse into the mind of a racing driver — and into the challenge McLaren had in front of it.

IF YOU MESS UP, YOU CAN’T BE PART OF McLAREN

The 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix was both a test of and a lesson for McLaren’s culture in its new era under Andrea Stella.

The engineer-turned-principal had honed the team in his 18 months in charge up to that point, preparing it to win in difficult situations.

Budapest was the first real stress test of those drills.

“We have discussions with our race drivers before every race,” he said at the time.

“The discussion we have is about our principles, because it’s very difficult to manage Formula 1 races if you only talk about rules like ‘the car ahead has priority at the stop’ — you really risk boxing yourself into a problem as every driver desperately tries to be ahead at the first corner, because then they want the priority.

“We talk about our principles, going racing. One principle, just to make an example — I don’t want to disclose too much, but this one is simple — is: the interest of the team comes first.

“If you mess up on this matter, you cannot be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team. That’s the principle.”

The primacy of the team is paramount. It’s not simply an expectation the drivers obey team orders and act in the team’s best interests; they must obey.

“We invest so much in culture, in values and in the mindset,” Stella said. “We want to be able to manage this situation if we want to be in the championship with Lando, with Oscar and with McLaren.

“I think you build this ethos if you manage days like today in a fair way, like I think we have done.”

Buy-in since that day has been absolute, with no repeat flashpoints.

There were various examples last season.

In Azerbaijan, with Norris still in title contention but having qualified out of position, he hampered his own race to slow Sergio Pérez and help Piastri claim a famous victory.

In the Brazil sprint Piastri gave up victory to give Norris a tiny points boost, with the Englishman repaying the favour — apparently of his own volition — in Qatar later in the year, by which time his title hopes had been extinguished.

“I think it just speaks of our teamwork and fairness for the team,” Piastri said after winning in Lusail. “It obviously doesn’t change the points, and I think it just shows off our teamwork and lack of egos within the team.”

BUT THE GAME HAS CHANGED

It was a neat conclusion to a championship-winning year. The ledger was levelled between the drivers, and the team ended the season having lived its values publicly.

But the game has changed in 2025.

McLaren is all but guaranteed the constructors championship. With a 268-point lead, it has more than twice second-placed Ferrari’s score just past the halfway mark of the season.

Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, meanwhile, are both hamstrung with uneven driver line-ups that automatically discount them from the fight.

And with Max Verstappen 81 points adrift of the drivers title lead, he’d need to win all 11 remaining grands prix with Piastri third or lower to win a fifth championship.

This is a straight fight between Piastri and Norris with no strings attached — a totally different circumstance to last year.

That’s doubly true given McLaren’s pace advantage has only grown through the year. It’s scored four one-two finishes over the last five grands prix, during which time it’s enjoyed an average advantage of almost 0.3 seconds in qualifying.

The Belgian Grand Prix demonstrated all those elements.

Having locked out the front row of the grid, the fight for victory was an exclusive one between the McLaren teammates, with Piastri prevailing with similar trademark ruthlessness to that which won him last year’s race in Hungary.

But it also demonstrated a new element.

We’ve seen hints of it this year so far, but Belgium was the first time this season the two drivers chose to take obviously different strategies.

Piastri switched from intermediates to mediums along with 18 other drivers. Teams knew the mediums more intimately, and it was considered a safer option in case of a safety car or other interruption, though it was unclear whether it would make it to the finish.

Norris opted for hards knowing they’d be able to make it to the finish, which would push his teammate into either managing to the end or having to pass him for victory late.

He did so after being coached by his engineer to make the choice — this was a decision from the Norris side of the pit wall designed to put Piastri’s side under maximum pressure.

This is far removed from last year’s requirement to have the entire team rowing in the same direction. Now the two sides of the garage are being willingly separated in the interests of a title battle.

McLaren has so far been scrupulously fair about the way it’s handled its drivers, but that task has been made easier by centrally controlling all the variables — think of the Australian Grand Prix, where it temporarily halted racing to ensure neither driver lost out in traffic or if the rain were to return in the interests of protecting the one-two finish.

Now, however, it’s allowing some of those variables to be decided by the drivers and their engineers.

It has the potential to create some interesting and perhaps sometimes uncomfortable situations.

Imagine, for example, if Norris had won after having been coached onto what turned out to be the faster hard-tyre strategy after Piastri has been put onto the default choice of mediums. Would that go down — rightly or not — as a type of interference in the fight between drivers?

What about, for example, situations in which the second car might want to pit first to execute a different strategy that begins with an undercut? If it’s allowed, it would be seen to be breaking a fundamental rule that gives the lead driver pit priority. If it’s not, would that also be seen as influencing the championship battle?

And how would the team handle a repeat of last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, where to protect the one-two finish, the second driver had to pit first and take the lead?

How would the driver balance their need to be selfish with their loyalty to the team then?

McLaren isn’t setting hard rules — at least not publicly. Instead it’s backing the principles it’s developed over the last two years to guide it to a fair result in any situation.

And it’s trusting that its drivers continue buying in, as they have done since the first flashpoint in their rivalry in Hungary last year.

“Even if this doesn’t make my life or Zak [Brown, CEO]‘s life any simpler, we are also racing in a certain way, which is open, which may give our drivers the opportunity to express their talents, their aspirations, their quality, their constant development,” Stella said, per Autosport.

“That’s what we are here for, and we are very privileged to be in this position not only with the team we have but with Oscar and Lando, who are two great drivers but above all two great individuals.

“There is very, very little between our two drivers and this is because the two drivers are racing at a very, very high level.

“We are lucky at McLaren to have two drivers that deservedly are fighting for the world championship. I think the difference will be made by the accuracy, the precision, the quality of the execution.”

Last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix set up McLaren for constructors championship success.

This year those principles are set for a far harsher test as Piastri and Norris race of individual glory.