McLaren defend Monza team orders after slow stop flips Norris-Piastri
Andrea Stella knew the boos were coming. McLaren left Monza with second and third behind Max Verstappen, but the last act — a radio call asking Oscar Piastri to hand a position back to Lando Norris — lit up the paddock almost as loudly as the tifosi.
Here’s how they got there. McLaren rolled the dice strategically, keeping both drivers long on mediums to convert to softs late. It was a plan built for chaos: a safety car, a red flag, anything that might pry open Verstappen’s third win of 2025. No restart arrived, but the stops still decided the order.
Norris, running ahead of Piastri for most of the afternoon, queried the call when McLaren initially looked to pit him first. “Do you want to box the other car first?” came the reply from the cockpit. McLaren obliged and pulled in Piastri. His stop was tidy. Norris’ wasn’t. A balky left-front wheel gun cost vital seconds, flipping their cars on the road.
Cue the team order. Piastri, audibly unimpressed, was told to move aside. He did. Twitter did not.
After the race, Stella set out the rationale with the calm of a man who’s lived a few Monzas. The intent, he said, was always to retain pre-stop order because the undercut on fresh softs was so powerful that Norris should have clawed back most of the time even with a slower service. In other words: if the stops had gone to plan, they wouldn’t have needed to ask.
“Had we gone first with Lando,” Stella explained, “even despite the pit stop, with such a strong undercut on a new soft, he could have recovered quite a bit of the time lost. We’re talking tenths. For us it was relatively simple: the intent was that we’re not going to swap positions, and the slow pit stop compounds with this intent.”
That intent, and the wider strategy, wasn’t drawn up on a whim. Stella linked the thinking back to McLaren’s 2024 Hungarian GP approach: don’t cover the obvious moves, hunt the bigger prize. “Stopping to cover Leclerc would have been the simple solution,” he admitted of Sunday’s chess match, “but it would have limited the result.” By staying out, McLaren kept two live win conditions: a late interruption that would reset the field, and a tyre delta to Verstappen if a safety car stacked the pack. “We wanted to stop late enough to go on softs,” Stella said. “Had there been a late safety car, we’d have been on softs with Verstappen on hard.”
None of that smooths the edges of asking a driver who nailed his out-lap and his marks to shuffle backwards. And in a season where Norris and Piastri have shared the same patch of asphalt more often than is comfortable for a pit wall, it’s no surprise the call drew heat. But the framing matters: this wasn’t a mid-race invention, it was the enforcement of the running order McLaren expected to preserve without the pit issue.
The human bit? Piastri’s initial frustration felt entirely fair. The professional bit? He complied immediately, and both he and Norris toed the team line afterward. The competitive bit? McLaren walked out of Ferrari’s backyard with a double podium on a day when Verstappen – untouchable from pole – gave them no opening. That’s not the worst outcome for a team playing the long game.
Stella, for his part, didn’t hide from the error. The left-front delay will go under the microscope this week back in Woking. “We will review all the data,” he said, “and pick up whatever learning we have for the future.” That future almost certainly includes more tightrope walks between two drivers operating at the sharp end, a car that now expects to fight for wins, and a championship picture that rewards ruthlessness as much as romance.
If you’re looking for villains here, you might be squinting at the wrong screen. McLaren took a calculated swing to beat the benchmark car, then tidied up a self-inflicted mess to deliver the maximum available. It wasn’t pretty. It was pragmatic. And at Monza, sometimes that’s the only play that makes sense.
