With nine races remaining till the end of the season, McLaren finds themselves in a contention not only for the Constructors’ Championship title, but also in a possible fight for the Drivers’ Championship. The gap between Lando Norris and defending champion Max Verstappen currently sits at 62 points, while McLaren is only 8 points behind leading Red Bull.
However, the team doesn’t seem to be a hundred percent determined to do whatever it takes to back Norris in the title battle — which is something other team principals look at doubtfully.
Despite the English driver qualifying on pole during the Italian Grand Prix, when it came to Sunday’s race in Monza, he was overtaken in turn four of the opening lap by his own teammate Oscar Piastri.
“It’s always a difficult position as a team but it’s inevitable at some point you’ve got to put your best foot forward, and it’s impossible to do that when you’ve got a situation like that,” said Christian Horner, the team principal of Red Bull, when asked if Norris should have gotten the preferential treatment after he got the start and the first chicane right to maintain the lead.
“I don’t know what the papaya rules are, but I’m sure they nearly took themselves out of the race at the second chicane, so from a Drivers’ Championship point of view it helped us out today,” Horner admitted.
Even though Verstappen only managed to finish in P6, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc ultimately winning the Grand Prix and Norris placing only in third helped the Dutchman in keeping a bigger gap to the McLaren rival.
Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ team principal who has his own experience of managing teammates who aren’t afraid to fight each other for positions on track, believes that the Woking-based squad needs to decide if they will or will not throw their all into backing Norris.
“I think as a racing team that is battling at the front suddenly, you are between a rock and a hard place because on one side they are racers like we are racers. We want to make sure that the best man wins but on the other side when it starts to become dysfunctional and impacting your team performance then how do you react to that,” he said in Monza.
“The team is always on the losing end because if you freeze positions and have team orders then you have maybe not what our racing soul wants to do, but the rational side needs to prevail.
“At the end, you don’t want to lose out on a championship by three or five points that you could have easily made. So walking that tightrope is so difficult and there is no universal truth of how to handle it.”
Wolff thinks that his McLaren counterpart, Andrea Stella, might have to divert a little from his sport instinct that commands him to let his two drivers fight freely and let the best man win after reviewing Piastri’s move on the first lap in Monza.
“There is nobody that understands sport more than Andrea. He has seen it all of that pan out in front of his eyes multiple times at Ferrari,” the Mercedes boss pointed to Stella’s time in the Italian team for over a decade, working as a performance engineer when Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen won their Drivers’ Championships.
“He has that racers’ soul that doesn’t want to do it and wants to let them race but I think they are going to come to some conclusion after this race, ‘how are we handling this’? This is when we started to introduce the rules of engagement, and then we changed the wording to racing intent because ‘rules’ was too harsh as a word for the drivers,” Wolff concluded in the case of the often mentioned ‘Papaya Rules’.
