Rosberg backs McLaren’s Monza swap — but warns the real fight hasn’t started
McLaren’s tidy papaya order at Monza has sparked a weekend’s worth of opinion and then some, and Nico Rosberg has now weighed in with the kind of perspective you get only after living through it. His verdict? There’s no clean right or wrong here — just the team’s way — and you’d better define it before the title run-in turns savage.
The flashpoint was simple enough. Running 1-2 with Max Verstappen looming behind as the de facto leader having already stopped, McLaren told their drivers there’d be “no undercut.” Oscar Piastri boxed first anyway — one lap prior to Lando Norris — and then the script flipped when Norris was delayed by a sticky wheel nut. Piastri emerged ahead. Cue an instruction to hand the place back. After a short back-and-forth with Tom Stallard, Piastri obliged.
It looked clinical from the pit wall, and divisive everywhere else. Some saw a team correcting its own error; others saw a title tilt being weighted toward one garage. Piastri, importantly, leads the championship by 31 points — which always colors these calls — and Norris has been the one hunting. McLaren chose not to let a pit stop gremlin decide the balance of power.
Rosberg understands the mechanics of that decision, and the politics. “The first step is, is it clearly defined in the rules?” he said on the Sky F1 podcast. “And I can tell you that it’s not defined in the papaya rules, because it’s not something that you can put down in a rule… The undercut is not what played the dice here. The problem is just the time lost in the pit stop.”
This is where Rosberg’s own past becomes useful context rather than nostalgia. In 2016, Mercedes had what he calls “silver rules”: if the team’s win was at risk, the drivers worked together. In Monaco that year, he waved Lewis Hamilton through to protect the win from Daniel Ricciardo. Abu Dhabi, though, was different. Hamilton needed Rosberg to lose a place to win the title and backed him into Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari. The team told Hamilton to push; he didn’t. “If you’re an assassin, you want to try and maximise the grey areas,” Rosberg said.
His read on McLaren’s move at Monza is blunt: given a bad hand, they picked the less bad card. “McLaren chose the better way, which was to redo the positions like before, because they messed up as a team and it’s not fair to get involved in that way into the Drivers’ Championship. So they took the route that was definitely better, but both routes were bad.”
The more intriguing part is where he thinks this goes. Rosberg reckons McLaren’s been “a bit lucky” so far that neither Piastri nor Norris has fully embraced the assassin’s edge that emerges when a title is on the line. That’s not a slight; it’s a seasoned warning about what happens when the walls close in.
“They’re just getting there, but they haven’t arrived yet,” he said. “The intensity still lies ahead of us, because World Championship is so big… They’re going to be fighting every weekend.”
So what should McLaren do? Sit down now, he says, and write as many scenarios as possible onto one page. Define the parameters, the trade-offs, the point at which a slow stop isn’t a free pass and when the risk to the race win overrides the internal battle. No team can legislate for every grey area — pit stops will always be messy, timing deltas always debatable — but clarity removes the oxygen from the next argument.
There’s a temptation to paint Monza as a morality play. It wasn’t. It was a team moving two cars like chess pieces to correct a blunder and keep its season on course. It worked because both drivers complied. That won’t always be the case, not if the points tighten and instincts sharpen. McLaren’s “papaya rules” have just been stress-tested; the next exam’s going to be harder.
The takeaway? The championship won’t be decided by who’s nicer on the radio. It’ll be decided by who lives best in the grey — and by whether McLaren can decide, in advance, where grey ends and the team’s red line begins.
