How McLaren avoided a “stressful situation” among its drivers

The team wanted to avoid what happened when its drivers converged on the Suzuka track.

   McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the team wanted to avoid creating a “stressful situation” with the Japanese Grand Prix strategy. The team decided to swap Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, who used a different tire strategy mid-race, to avoid losing a one-stop strategy to George Russell.

   Norris spent a few laps behind Piatri before the team told the Australian to move to his team-mate so they could finally secure the podium without worrying about the threat of Mercedes or Ferrari.

   This was in contrast to the scenario at Monza, where Norris lost time behind Piatri and was ultimately unable to pass Alex Albonia due to Williams’ overwhelming straightaway advantage.

   The team was also in the spotlight after the Hungarian GP when they appeared to give Norris a better strategy, allowing him to exploit the underlying power to pass Piastr. Stella: We wanted to see if overtaking could happen naturally “This [Japan] was much easier than those situations. Those two situations were tight – especially the Monza situation,” Stella said When I say stressful, I mean we created a stress between our two drivers that we could have avoided. That is something we appreciate, it could happen again in the future, but if it is avoidable, we should avoid it .

   “In this case, the approach was to see how quickly Lando is closing and see if the overtaking comes naturally. “When we saw that it was not so natural, we asked the riders to change so as not to lose. race time for both.”

   Stella said she would like the riders to pass the track “naturally”, having previously said she would not be against them racing. “If overtaking comes naturally, there’s no need to train the drivers.

   So we wanted to see if it was possible. “But to be fair to the ‘Let’s see if it happens naturally’, there was only one lap. I thought that was as fair as we could get.