No papaya playbook: Norris shrugs off ‘rules’ talk as McLaren defends Monza swap
McLaren’s Italian Grand Prix team orders might’ve sounded like a manifesto moment, but inside the garage it was far simpler: fix an unfair situation and move on. Lando Norris insists there’s no sacred ‘papaya rules’ document guiding who gets the upper hand, just a short, blunt brief: be fair.
“There are no papaya rules anymore,” Norris told DAZN after Monza. “We’ve never had them.” Asked what does exist, he said the guidance is barely a page and boils down to one word: fair. Fair to him, fair to Oscar Piastri, fair to the championship.
That, in McLaren’s view, meant reordering their cars when a slow 5.9s pit stop – a sticky wheel nut on Norris’s MCL38 – dropped the Briton behind Piastri through no fault of his own. The call to swap was made, Piastri was asked twice, and the place changed hands. Cue boos on the Monza rostrum and a fresh round of debate about whether the team is tilting the title fight towards its homegrown superstar.
Andrea Stella didn’t blink. “However the championship goes, what matters is that it runs within the principles and racing values we’ve created together with our drivers,” the team principal said. In other words: respect the guy who was ahead before a mechanic’s nightmare, don’t crash into each other, and don’t set the season on fire to win one podium battle.
It’s not the first time anyone’s heard about McLaren’s internal code — Zak Brown’s “race each other respectfully” line did the rounds last year — but Norris wanted to puncture the idea of some grand Papaya Constitution. He also made it clear this wasn’t a power grab. “I don’t choose that these things happen,” he said of the pit stop. “We do what we think is right for us.”
From Piastri’s side, there was a brief radio debate with Tom Stallard, then compliance. The Australian was pragmatic after banking third. “For the long term it was the best decision,” he said. “Lando had been ahead all weekend and I understood the call. We’ve discussed these scenarios before — we’ll keep clarifying them — but for me there was no problem.”
It didn’t stop the optics from getting messy. Italian fans don’t do nuance when they feel a result was managed, and Bernie Ecclestone waded in from the sidelines suggesting McLaren prefer a champion named Lando Norris. That’s the kind of commentary that sticks when the grandstands are already whistling.
Strip away the noise, though, and this was textbook housekeeping for a title-contending team. Piastri still walked away with a 31-point lead in the Drivers’ standings with eight rounds to go — a margin that’s comfortable enough to breathe, not big enough to coast. Asked if he’s doing the points math on Sundays yet, Piastri swatted it away. “Too early for that. Today the best I could do was P3.”
The bigger question is what this means for the next tight McLaren-on-McLaren. Because there will be another, probably several. The championship is now a knife fight conducted with velvet gloves. Both drivers insist the swap would’ve happened the other way around. Both looked like they meant it. But points change people in late autumn, and we’re almost there.
Inside the team, the stance is clear: restore the order that existed before a glitch, then let them race. It’s a reasonable line, if a little antiseptic when the sport thrives on conflict. The risk? That a few more of these calls and the crowd decides the story for them — that the guy in papaya orange with the Union Jack on his overalls is getting the rub of the green.
Norris, for his part, knows exactly how these moments look and how little control he has over them. “It’s something outside my control,” he said of the stop. “It’s not what I want or what the team wants. It complicates things. But it’s what we all decided was the right thing to correct if it happened.”
So no papaya tablet set in stone. No secret memo anointing a No.1. Just a short brief about fairness and a long season still in play. The rest? That’ll be decided in turn one, in the pit box, and in the split-second calls where trust either holds or frays.
Eight races to go. Two drivers who can win it. One team trying to keep the peace. Monza won’t be the last time the volume gets turned up.
