Andrea Stella isn’t bending. In the wake of Monza’s late-race seat swap, McLaren’s team principal has made it clear the call wasn’t a one-off and won’t change even if the Constructors’ Championship is wrapped up early.
The flashpoint came at the Italian Grand Prix when Oscar Piastri, who’d emerged ahead of Lando Norris after an offset pit sequence and a sluggish stop for Norris, was told to move aside. Piastri wasn’t thrilled — “I thought we said slow stops are part of racing,” came the radio jab — but he complied, handing back track position to his teammate and title rival.
McLaren’s logic, Stella says, was simple: the team had established pre-race principles about pit priority and sequencing, and they were merely restoring the order that was meant to exist before the slow stop skewed it. Hungary 2024 was the precedent; Monza was the rerun.
“The noise is natural,” Stella said of the backlash. “Formula 1 is very popular. We’re fine with the comments when they’re respectful. What matters for us is what we do internally, and how we set ourselves to keep going racing. From the pit wall, we execute what we agree with our drivers — our racing principles.”
Those principles, he stressed, won’t be relaxed even if (or when) McLaren seals the constructors’ crown. The team is on course to defend its 2024 title and could even clinch it in Baku under the right circumstances, but Stella isn’t preparing to let the intra-team fight off the leash just yet.
“No, the approach to the Drivers’ Championship will not change,” he said. “This is not dependent on the Constructors’. The way we go racing reflects the values we embody as McLaren Racing, and it protects the unity of the team — that’s foundational for the future.”
The context matters. McLaren’s 2025 has been built on twin spearheads. Norris and Piastri are the only pair consistently trading blows for the title while Max Verstappen’s Red Bull has lacked the week-in, week-out ceiling to dictate the season. At Monza, Verstappen won; Norris and Piastri ran second and third, and then the stop sequence muddied the waters. McLaren stepped in, citing its own playbook, and the debate hasn’t stopped since: fair play, or stage management?
Inside Woking, they’ve already done the review. “Like after every event, we looked at it,” Stella said. “We confirmed the way we operated is what we intended — and what we’ll continue to do. We remain open and attentive, but that situation gave us a chance to confirm our approach.”
Norris, for his part, sounded largely unmoved by the furore. He pushed back on the suggestion that he and Piastri aren’t allowed to race, arguing the Monza call simply restored the intended order after the pit-stop glitch. Once that was done, he said, it was game on.
“For 99 percent of things, of course,” he said when asked if the drivers are free to fight. “If you make it simple — as in Hungary last year — the driver in the lead has priority in a pit-stop sequence. That’s what we were entering at Monza. As soon as we re-established the positions, Oscar could race me freely. He was on my gearbox and could go for it. Otherwise, we’ve been free to race every time.”
Piastri has parked the frustration. He didn’t benefit at Monza and he knows it impacted his own championship fight, but he’s aligned on the internal guidelines and intends to keep them internal.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions about how we want to go racing,” he said. “A lot of that stays with us because if we give out that information, then we become easy targets — everyone knows what we’re going to do. It’s all aligned, but it stays in-house.”
Strip away the noise and what’s left is a team doubling down on consistency: pre-agreed rules, applied regardless of who it helps on a given Sunday or whether a bigger trophy is already in the cabinet. It’s not the most romantic way to referee two drivers in a live title fight, but you can see the reasoning. McLaren has spent two seasons building a culture that keeps both drivers in the hunt without letting the walls shake.
The question, inevitably, is whether the leash ever slackens. Stella’s answer is no — and with the calendar turning to Baku and beyond, McLaren’s margin for internal chaos is thinner than it looks from the grandstands. The title may be won on the edges, but at Woking the edges are defined before the lights go out.
