McLaren eye split-strategy play at Zandvoort — with one clear warning from Stella: beat Max first
McLaren’s front-row lockout at Zandvoort sets up the sort of Sunday that keeps strategists awake at night. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are separated by just nine points in the championship with 10 race weekends to go, and while team orders remain off the table, Andrea Stella isn’t pretending the pit wall is a passive observer in this title fight.
“The strategy is one of the variables through which the competition between Lando and Oscar can express itself,” the team principal said after qualifying. “But first of all, we have Lando, we have Oscar, we have Max Verstappen. The first thing we have to do in the interest of the team — and the interest of Lando and Oscar — is to make sure that we beat Max.”
Simple message, layered reality. Zandvoort is tight, tricky to pass on, and there’s a whiff of weather around. Pirelli has it on the knife edge between one and two stops. That combination invites divergence — the very scenario that put the championship complexion on its head a month ago in Hungary.
Back in Budapest, Piastri pressed hard against Charles Leclerc early and stopped on Lap 18 to trigger the undercut. Norris, shuffled to fifth on the opening lap, stayed long — very long — and didn’t box until Lap 31. That tyre offset flipped McLaren’s race. Norris turned a nominal two-stopper into a one-stop, absorbed the pressure late, and beat his teammate to the flag. No swaps, no “after you.” Just a bold stint and tidy tyre management rewarded.
Piastri handled it with his usual straight bat, conceding Norris had little to lose by stretching the first stint and that the pre-race expectation was two stops for both cars. McLaren, for its part, faced the awkward questions that arise when an in-house duel gets decided on differing calls from the pit wall. That’s the space Stella moved to address at Zandvoort.
“When it comes to the options from a strategic point of view between our two drivers, we do have some rules for that,” he said. “I’m not going to share what rules they are, but whatever you have seen so far this year in terms of how the strategy has been utilised, it’s always been within our rules.
“It’s perfectly right, for instance, that there are deviations in terms of strategy — and not necessarily gambling like in Hungary. The one-stop wasn’t completely out of the cards. It was unlikely to be one of the strategies, but it wasn’t simply a matter of a gamble. Even here, the strategy is not far between a one and a two-stop.”
Read that as McLaren placing guardrails around freedom, not shackles. The team is clearly determined to avoid splitting its garage into “us vs them,” while still allowing drivers and engineers to race smart. That matters when both are in the title picture and, as Stella put it, when “we can see that McLaren is the fastest car.”
Hungary didn’t just test their procedures; it tested their people. Any lingering bruises? Stella says no. “We had our debriefs, our reviews, our conversations, but both drivers, Oscar included, accepted that there’s a degree of variability in racing,” he explained. “At the time at which we stopped Oscar, we didn’t think, in fairness, that Lando would have been in condition to beat Oscar or Leclerc, because we thought that all cars were going on a two-stop. When Lando found himself in condition to extend and see if a one-stop was possible, then credit to Lando that he managed the tyres very well.”
That’s the tightrope McLaren must walk again today. Commit both cars to the same plan and you’re “fair,” but perhaps brittle if conditions shift. Split them and you’re covered — until one side of the garage rolls snake eyes.
And all the while, Verstappen lurks from third with a tactical ace up his sleeve. “Max, for instance, has a new soft that he saved from qualifying,” Stella noted. “It could be a pretty powerful weapon if you can deploy this weapon strategically at the right time.” On a track where track position is king and the pit window can be sprung open by a stray Safety Car, that fresh set might be worth more than the stopwatch says.
The Dutch Grand Prix has the feel of a proper chess match: a tense opening, a ruthless middlegame, and at least one decisive move that might be obvious only in hindsight. McLaren’s priority is unambiguous — lock out Verstappen and bank the big points — but there’s no hiding from the intra-team stakes. If Zandvoort tips one-stop, Norris’s touch might be gold dust again. If it trends two-stop with punchy out-laps, Piastri’s precision could turn the screws.
Either way, Stella’s drawn the box lines. The racing — and the title — will be decided inside them.
