McLaren has admitted its approach to team orders is making life difficult for itself, but says there is no “easy solution” that does not risk upsetting one of its drivers.
The Woking-based squad successfully came through the Brazil sprint race with a 1-2 finish, having swapped its cars around to help Lando Norris’s quest to win the world championship.
But the situation was far from straightforward as, with Norris stacked up behind Oscar Piastri earlier in the race, the team risked the Briton being exposed to attack from Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen right behind him.
While the occasional window appeared to open up in the early stages of the 24-lap sprint to get Piastri to let Norris through, the team kept them racing until two laps from home – when the risk of a Virtual Safety Car for Nico Hulkenberg’s stranded Haas forced its hand in getting the swap done.
McLaren was fortunate that neither Leclerc nor Verstappen were able to stay right with Norris though, because having not switched its cars earlier there was a danger of it never having an opportunity to do so before the chequered flag.
Team principal Andrea Stella has admitted that the team orders situation is a difficult one to manage – but points out that there is no solution that will keep the team and both drivers perfectly happy.
“Making life difficult for ourselves is natural, because when you have two drivers that can win races and a car that can win races, this first thing you have to accept is there's not an easy solution,” he told Autosport.
“That already sets you in a good mindset to deal with the potential difficulties.
“But, like I have said already in the past, we have worked very hard to put ourselves in this difficult situation - and we are all on the same page: team and drivers.
“I always discuss with the drivers, and say that this is the most difficult thing we are going to face in our career, because this is the only thing that we cannot face by having our interests exactly matching.”
Why McLaren delayed the switch
McLaren went into the Brazil sprint crystal clear that the ultimate intention was to have Norris finish ahead of Piastri.
However, what was not settled was how that would be executed in the race, especially because the team could not be certain about how its rivals would get involved.
Explaining how its calls played out, Stella said that the team had agreed with both drivers that they race away as normal – with the priority being that they do not allow any other cars to get between them.
The idea then was to swap the cars once the pair had got to the point where there was a big enough gap behind Norris, so that race-leader Piastri would not be at risk of being overtaken by anyone else.
Stella added: “We knew that we wanted to swap. But we were waiting for the right gap behind Lando, because if you swap and the other car gets in the DRS, we may compromise one of the principles, which is maximum result for the team.
“So, we were observing, and we were ideally waiting for a couple of seconds [gap], but repeated for a couple of laps.”
Stella said that without the gap behind Norris staying large enough for several laps, it felt the risk was too much to force a change too soon.
“The gaps in the sectors were moving around a bit, and I wasn't completely comfortable to expose Oscar to Leclerc, because, at some stage, Leclerc didn't seem slow at all at the start of the race.
“Even the time the two seconds appeared, the next lap, it was 1.2 seconds. We were waiting for the right opportunity.
“We didn’t want to get excited and then create a situation that doesn't maximise the result for the team. We knew that we had time to do that, unless there was a risk of a safety car.
“And as soon as we saw the risk of a safety car towards the end of the race, then we needed to accelerate the process.”
