McLaren’s team principal, Andrea Stella, has said they will review team orders with a view to backing Lando Norris in his bid to beat Max Verstappen to the Formula One world championship.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc won the Italian Grand Prix on Sunday while McLaren could return only second and third for Oscar Piastri and Norris from their one-two on the grid. With Verstappen finishing a distant sixth, the race was an ideal chance for Norris to close the gap to the world champion but he gained only eight points on his rival.
Norris has for several races appeared the only realistic challenger to Red Bull’s Verstappen, but McLaren have insisted their drivers are free to race and they did so at Monza, with Piastri taking the lead from Norris on lap one. As McLaren and their drivers focused on their race against one another, Ferrari pulled off a masterstroke with a one-stop strategy that won them the race.
McLaren faced repeated questions afterwards as to why they had not imposed team orders to back Norris and why they had not switched the order of their drivers at the death, to maximise Norris’s potential points gain against Verstappen.
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Stella conceded that now he now believed the team were genuinely in a fight with Verstappen and Red Bull for both championships they would consider fully backing Norris for the remaining eight rounds. The British driver currently has 241 points to his credit, 62 behind Verstappen on 303.
“It looks a little brutal if you ask a driver who is going to win a race he gained on track that you have to swap positions but we will review all these things for the next races,” he said. “If we come to the conclusion together that swapping is the right thing to do then we will do it.”
McLaren now trail Red Bull by only eight points in the constructors’ championship but this is the first time this season that they appear to have accepted they have a real shot at the drivers’ championship. A realisation that many will argue is somewhat tardy, given Norris has been eking into Verstappen’s lead for some time and with Red Bull’s recent drop in performance.
“It now looks like the drivers’ championship is definitely a possibility,” said Stella. “We were a little cautious before Monza, but now we can see that McLaren can compete at circuits where last year we were not competitive.
“Lando is obviously in the best position from a numbers point of view. We are fighting Max Verstappen, so I think if we want to give support to one driver we certainly have to pick the one who is in the best position, and Lando has been doing very well.”
Verstappen is without a win for six races now, since the Spanish Grand Prix in late June. With McLaren proving to have the quickest car on both the high-downforce track at the last round in Zandvoort and the low downforce of Monza, they have a remarkable advantage and Stella accepted his team needs to exploit it.
“We need to be better at capitalising the opportunity Red Bull at the moment seem to offer by not being in the usual possibility of competing for podiums,” he said. – Guardian
