6 days ago
2
Lando Norris claimed that he did not know why the Tifosi booed him on the Monza podium. Which is either a case of wilful ignorance or extreme naivety.
It is clear from a distance as long as the Temple of Speed’s back straight that his finishing position, whatever else it might represent for good or bad, was a distortion of sport’s natural order.
I sensed that Andrea Stella, McLaren’s team principal, who instructed Oscar Piastri to hand his place back to Norris late on, thus putting the Australian third, knew the scenario was less than ideal.
He normally outlines his rationale with cool, detached sense, every brick of his thought process slotting neatly in place. But this time, an hour or so after Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, as he sat in the team hospitality area facing the press, he seemed a touch conflicted.
Yes, his argument had strengths, and, as he is a scrupulously fair man, it was underpinned by a moral purpose. But it contained a fundamental flaw, too, because he had overridden an intrinsic aspect of a grand prix – a pit stop – and imposed his own artificial carapace over it.
The blur of a tyre change should be an indivisible determinant in a race’s make-up. It can confer an advantage on a driver if accomplished fast (as Piastri enjoyed), or hamper progress if goofed (as Norris’s was). Such is life. Live with it, boys.
Lando Norris' late swap saw him take second at Monza over McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri
Piastri took it well and without complaint - but this seemed a step too far
To the specifics of Sunday’s contentious events. Max Verstappen was out of sight in his Red Bull. Norris was next best in qualifying and in the grand prix, where he was running in second position practically all afternoon. Piastri was third-quickest.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was in fourth, had just been rebooted on soft tyres and was closing on Piastri at the rate of half a second per lap.
So, as Stella’s reasoning goes, it was important to pit Piastri before Norris. Usually, the leading of the two McLarens would have been reshod first.
Actually, this part of Stella’s account is questionable, for Piastri was 28.5 seconds ahead of Leclerc and could easily have stayed out a lap longer than Norris, given the usual 25 seconds lost in the pits during a routine stop.
A conspiracist might think that Stella was at least in part prompted by another consideration. If Norris had come in first and a safety car come out immediately afterwards then Piastri would then have been gifted a free stop and jumped Norris.
Whatever, the crux of the problem arose when a tardy wheel gun on the front left of Norris’s car caused him a 5.9sec change. He re-emerged behind Piastri. Hence the pivotal order to swap. Piastri, despite registering a flicker of misgiving, complied without delay.
Norris, therefore, narrowed his deficit to Piastri at the championship peak to 31 points rather than fall 37 down a cliff, a week after an oil leak forced him to retire in Zandvoort. Did this devastating blow (for which one can only feel bone-deep sympathy for Norris) colour Stella’s thinking?
Did he believe harmony among his drivers was best preserved by evening out bad luck by human intervention? Stella, incidentally, denies this was so.
Andrea Stella (centre) was at the heart of the decision and for once, was conflicted in explaining it afterwards
Why was Piastri punished just because his pit stop went well?
Norris' pit stop was a mess as the mechanics raced to fix his front left tyre, which had not been fastened properly
The Italian, with the support of chief executive Zak Brown, has managed the historically impossible by neutering the selfish alpha tendency among closely matched intra-team title rivals. This is the shiniest nicey-nicey enmity in Formula One memory. Boring for the observer; an act of managerial aplomb by Stella.
He has diffused many a ticking bomb, but this was reasonableness gone too far. That is not only my view but the triumphant Verstappen’s. When told of the musical chairs, he chortled: ‘Ha. Just for a slow pit stop!’
Toto Wolff later sounded an alarm. As the referee when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were at each other’s gearboxes during their prolonged hostilities at Mercedes, his comments are battle-hardened.
He acknowledged Stella’s dilemma, but added: ‘You set a precedent that is very difficult to undo. What if the team does another mistake and it’s not a pit stop? Do you switch them around?’
Indeed, in bending over backwards to solve a riddle, McLaren may have kicked a bigger problem down the road.
