Lando Norris isn’t here for the hand-wringing. After McLaren’s tidy bit of team management at Monza — the call for Oscar Piastri to hand back track position following a slow stop for Norris — the Briton’s message to those crying foul was concise: not our problem.
While Max Verstappen disappeared up the road in familiar fashion, McLaren’s afternoon in Italy pivoted on pit wall arithmetic. Piastri was pitted first to cover the undercut threat from Charles Leclerc, even though Norris had been leading that orange train on track. When Norris stopped a lap later, a sluggish service dropped him behind his teammate. McLaren then asked Piastri to cede the place. He wasn’t thrilled, made his case, then complied. Norris finished P2; Piastri P3. The net effect: Norris trimmed Piastri’s championship lead to 31 points.
Predictably, that didn’t sit well with everyone. Norris, though, wasn’t swayed by the noise.
“Not in the world that we live in nowadays,” he said when asked if the backlash surprised him. “That’s all people want to do, you know, be negative and talk badly about others. But it doesn’t affect us as a team. We continue to do things our way, whether people agree with it or not. It’s not our problem.”
The post-race story had initially been presented as McLaren reversing a position lost purely through a botched stop. Norris pushed back on that framing once he’d seen the full picture. The call, he explained, was rooted in the strategic sequence: covering Leclerc early, then restoring order once both McLarens were through their stops.
“There were some things at that point that I didn’t know about, the undercut from Leclerc,” Norris said. “It was not just a pit stop which made that decision; it was more the sequencing of things… We both agreed with it after and accepted that’s what we agree as a team.”
McLaren’s stance this season has been clear: equal opportunity, equal consideration, and minimal interference unless strategy demands it. Monza was the most visible intervention in a while, and Norris was quick to say as much. He pointed to Hungary last year as the closest parallel — different circumstances, same underlying principle — and suggested the team’s hand has rarely been forced in 2025.
“Of course they try and keep things fair between us,” he added, “but it’s not been many things where they’ve had to actually get involved.”
Fairness is a noble aim; it’s also messy in real time. David Coulthard, a 12-time grand prix winner with McLaren, branded the Monza switch “manipulating the result.” That’s a stinging line, but it also oversimplifies what front-running teams actually do in the title fight: protect the strategy, protect the points, keep both sides of the garage aligned. On Sunday, McLaren did all three.
Piastri’s brief resistance — more a statement of pride than insubordination — was telling. He made his point, then got on with it. That matters as much as the swap itself. In a year where both McLaren drivers have had the pace and the composure to live in the sharp end, the working relationship has held up under heat. You can call that corporate harmony if you like; the scoreboard calls it necessary.
The wider truth is this: team orders never go out of style. They ebb and flow with context, and context at Monza was straightforward. Verstappen had the win wrapped. McLaren’s best play was to lock in a 2-3, in the order they believed reflected the strategy they’d chosen. They did that. And if the internet didn’t love it, well — Norris already covered that.
There’s a practical edge to the defiance, too. McLaren arrives in Baku with a shot at putting one hand — maybe two — on the constructors’ trophy. They’ve set the standard for efficiency this year, and the Azerbaijan Grand Prix tends to reward teams that make their calls early and cleanly. If roles reverse down those kilometer-long straights and Piastri’s the one in the box seat, you’d expect the same logic to apply, just with a different radio message.
None of this means McLaren is throttling the fight between its drivers. If anything, the consistency of the approach suggests the opposite. The team trusts the pair to race; it reserves the right to tidy up the loose ends when strategy makes a mess. In 2025, that’s what a grown-up title campaign looks like.
Norris put it more bluntly: “We want it to be fair. We want it to be equal for both of us, and then people can comment whatever they like after that.”
They will. And McLaren will carry on collecting the points.
