McLaren prepared to “amend” approach to team orders if necessary – Stella

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says the team could amend its approach to team orders after reviewing its controversial decision in the Italian Grand Prix.

He said the team including the drivers will review their decision to reverse the unintended position swap which occured when Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris pitted at Monza. Norris was told his team mate would not be allowed to overtake him through the pit stops, and when his slow tyre change allowed Piastri to get ahead, McLaren told the pair to swap back.

Stella said the team will consider whether the decision was in line with their philosophy of racing and whether they should do the same again in future. However he pointed out that “in Formula 1 very rarely do you get exactly the same situation” repeating.

“The way we will use this case is to review it, see how consistent it was with the application of our racing principles, we will discuss it with the drivers and we will reinforce the way we go racing where needed,” he told the official Formula 1 channel.

“We will amend it, if necessary, with an open mind. But at the moment, I’m pretty comfortable that the situation was all consistent with our approach.”

He said the decision to swap the cars around wasn’t “a black-and-white [call], because we are dealing with the application of principles.

“But as soon as we reflected on the situation we compounded the fact that we had a slow pit stop but we also had a sequencing of pit stops which was determined by the team, with absolutely no intention of swapping the positions.

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“Once we compounded these two elements, then for me in particular, it was clear that the application of the racing principles we have at McLaren meant that we swap positions and then we let the guys race again.”

McLaren and other teams ordinarily give the benefit of pitting first to whichever of its two drivers is ahead. Stella said McLaren did not do so on this occasion because it had delayed its pit stops so long that Piastri was coming under threat from Charles Leclerc behind him.

“Once Max [Verstappen] pitted we wanted to stay out as long as possible to see if a red flag or a Safety Car happened and also we wanted the opportunity to go on the soft tyres,” he said. “Because in this case, even if there was a Safety Car at some stage, towards the end of the race, Max would have been out on hard tyres, we would be on soft. So there were some situations that we were chasing.

“These delayed the stop, and delayed the stop to a point where we realised that we needed to go with Oscar first. In going with Oscar first, we always said there should be no swap of positions. This is just the team going with this level of sequencing, just before we wanted to push our attempt to win the race to the last moment.”

The timing of Piastri’s pit stop “was just in relation to Leclerc,” said Stella. “We will review the calculations, but at some stage this risk emerged at the pit wall and we needed to take that into account.”

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