‘No papaya rules’: Norris bristles as McLaren orders light a fuse under the title fight
Lando Norris walked out of Monza sounding less like a driver in harmony with his team and more like a man who’d reached for the handbrake. “There are no papaya rules anymore. We’ve never had them,” he told DAZN after a late swap with Oscar Piastri turned McLaren’s Sunday into a public airing of house rules.
What looked like a routine McLaren one-two behind Max Verstappen’s Red Bull turned messy in seconds. The team broke with its usual protocol by pitting Piastri first despite the Australian running behind on track. Norris stopped a lap later, got delayed, and rejoined behind his teammate. Cue the radio call: Piastri, give the place back. The change was made on the pit straight in the final laps, and Verstappen duly took his third win of 2025. McLaren’s first run without a victory since Canada was suddenly carrying extra baggage.
The swap matters because of the scoreboard. Norris’ P2 trims Piastri’s championship advantage to 31 points with eight rounds left. That’s not nothing when both cars have a habit of living at the front. And it’s exactly the kind of grey-zone moment that can define a teammate title fight: who gets priority, and when?
McLaren’s “papaya rules” became a 2024 buzz phrase — a set of guidelines to keep Norris and Piastri from making each other’s lives expensive in wheel-to-wheel combat. Post-Monza, Norris insisted the thing never existed as written lore. He described a short, catch-all understanding — “not even a page long” — built around a single word: fair. That line, “we do what we think is right for us,” sounded less like kumbaya and more like a driver staking a claim.
Former McLaren and Alpine design engineer Mark Lane didn’t miss the subtext. “Toys and pram are the words that spring to mind,” he posted in response to the fallout, arguing that the order to swap was the right call not for etiquette, but because it added some needed heat to a title contest now brimming with needle. He’s not wrong about the needle. The optics of pitting the trailing car first, then asking him to reverse the gains after a slow stop on the other side of the garage, is the sort of thing that sticks.
It also throws up the question Woking needs to answer fast: what, exactly, is fair between two drivers capable of winning this thing? Do you lock in pre-race priorities? Do you play it by stint? Do you freeze positions after the first stops? There are ten clever ways to dress it up, but Monza showed how quickly “we’ll manage it live” slips into “we’ll argue about it later.”
Nico Rosberg’s been here. The 2016 World Champion, whose own internal battle with Lewis Hamilton nearly boiled the silver paint off the Mercedes, urged McLaren to get ahead of it. “Please sit down, take time to plan ahead for as many possible situations as possible and clearly define them amongst your drivers,” he said on the Sky F1 podcast. Rosberg also — and this is the line that will linger — suggested McLaren has been “a bit lucky” that Norris and Piastri “are not yet proper assassins.” Give it a few Sundays.
For the record, none of this torpedoes the season’s big picture. Verstappen, the reigning four-time champion, remains a threat whenever Red Bull nails the window, and he did at Monza. But the championship is living inside the orange garage, and it’s getting louder. McLaren have been relentlessly efficient for months, but efficiency is often allergic to ambiguity. The moment a team deviates from its own playbook and the pit delta flips the cars, you’ve written the subplot. Norris’ tone tells you he knows it.
If we’re reading Norris correctly, the message is simple: don’t call something “fair” only after it benefits the other side. If we’re reading Piastri correctly, the message is just as simple: don’t penalise me for the team’s slow stop. Andrea Stella and company don’t have the luxury of letting that dynamic self-police anymore. They’ve got eight races to win a drivers’ title and keep two garage doors from slamming.
What would a grown-up plan look like? Something blunt. Pre-race priority based on who leads the championship. First stops locked to that priority unless an undercut for the field is on the table. Post-stop swaps if a service error flips track position. Clear language for safety cars and VSCs. And a final clause for when all else fails: if you’re quicker, prove it within a window, or stay put. Drivers hate it. Teams need it.
And if you think this was spicy, wait until the next time the undercut is worth three seconds and the traffic map looks like spaghetti. Norris vs Piastri is the story of 2025. Monza didn’t just underline it — it drew it in highlighter.
The last word goes to reality: nobody’s winning this title without their teammate. That’s the awkward truth McLaren must sell in private, even as the rest of us enjoy the theatre in public.
