McLaren: Team orders always ‘make life difficult for ourselves’
McLaren's successful 1-2 finish in the Brazilian Sprint race came with a dose of complexity, with a team order handing the win to Lando Norris over Oscar Piastri.
But as team boss Andrea Stella insists, there’s no simple solution that can satisfy both drivers and maintain the team’s performance goals.
From pole, Piastri took command of proceedings in Saturday’s 24-lap race, but relinquished his lead, and a sure win, to Norris to allow the Briton to maximize his points haul in the championship relative to Max Verstappen.
Stella admitted that while the team would prefer a straightforward approach, their current situation of having two competitive drivers inherently complicates things.
He added that managing driver dynamics has become one of the most challenging aspects of the team's race strategies.
“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 explained, quoted by Motorsport.com.
“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.”
In a race that saw the top four contenders running close together from the outset, timing the swap between the two McLaren drivers was everything.
As Stella explained, the team wanted to avoid exposing Piastri to potential threats from Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen close behind.
“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,” explained the McLaren chief.
“So, we were observing, and we were ideally waiting for a couple of seconds [gap], but repeated for a couple of laps.”
Only when a sufficient gap opened up behind Norris did they consider making the swap. However, the fluctuating time intervals posed another challenge, and Stella emphasized the importance of waiting for the ideal moment to act.
“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,” he explained.
“Even the time the two seconds appeared, the next lap, it was 1.2 seconds. We were waiting for the right opportunity.”
As the race neared its end, the appearance of Nico Hulkenberg’s stranded Haas on track threatened to bring out a safety car. This spurred McLaren to expedite the swap, as a safety car could limit opportunities to execute their strategy.
“We didn’t want to get excited and then create a situation that doesn't maximise the result for the team,” Stella said. “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.”
Despite the complexities of managing team orders, Stella remains committed to prioritizing the team’s overall goals, recognizing that such strategies are essential to achieving maximum results – even if they occasionally put McLaren in challenging situations.
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