Andrea Stella let his two drivers fight it out at Monza with no team orders, no radio intervention, nothing. Almost had two McLarens in the gravel because of it. Now he is promising a review, which is corporate speak for admitting the call very nearly blew up in his face.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri spent the closing laps of the Italian Grand Prix trading paint, or near enough, with Norris eventually taking fourth ahead of his team-mate. Norris briefly called it dangerous over the radio before softening his stance in the press pen afterwards, a climbdown already covered in detail elsewhere on this site. What matters now is what McLaren’s management actually thinks about a scrap that put both cars on the grass and, by the team’s own admission, may have cost them a crack at Max Verstappen for the final podium spot.
Stella’s Logic, and Why It’s Being Picked Apart
Speaking to media including RacingNews365, Stella explained why he chose not to step in as Norris hunted down Piastri with identical tyres and identical car age between them.
“In this situation, we thought that for Lando to be able to have a chance on Max, he should first be able to pass Oscar. And the two cars were on the same tyres, the same tyre age, the same car. So we thought there was no need to interfere with the normal development of the race. We let them race.” – Andrea Stella
Fine in theory. Except the theory very nearly ended with Norris running out of road at Curva Grande on Lap 51 of 53, forced onto the grass as Piastri covered his line into the second chicane. That is the moment McLaren now wants to pick apart, not because the racing was unfair, but because it burned laps and energy that might otherwise have gone into hunting down Verstappen’s Red Bull.
Stella did not shy away from the maths either. Verstappen, he reckoned, was simply quicker on the day regardless of what unfolded behind him.
“We think that was the right thing to do. I think overall Max was faster. He was just caught in this hook that you have this year, when you lose the slipstream here in Monza, and you have to use the energy to defend from someone else.” – Andrea Stella
The Podium That Got Away
Here is the part that should sting inside the McLaren garage. Verstappen finished third, and McLaren’s own boss is conceding his team spent the closing stages fighting itself rather than the Red Bull ahead. Norris eventually got the job done against Piastri on the final lap, sealing it into the Ascari chicane, but by then the laps McLaren needed to close out any real threat on Verstappen had already gone. A review confirmed after the fact does not get those laps back.
It is worth remembering McLaren has form on letting its drivers race hard rather than imposing team orders, and mostly it has worked out fine. This time it worked out fine only in the sense that both cars made it home in one piece. Whether “no harm done” is really the standard McLaren wants to hold itself to when a podium was arguably on the table is exactly the question this review needs to answer honestly, rather than just rubber-stamp the decision Stella already made in the heat of the race.
What the Drivers Actually Said, Briefly
Norris called Piastri’s move “fair” once he’d had time to think it over, having initially claimed on team radio that he’d been pushed off. Piastri, for his part, put the outcome down to a gamble on energy deployment that simply did not land his way on the final lap. Both accounts have already been covered in full elsewhere on this site; the point here is that neither driver seems especially bothered by what happened, which makes the review feel less like damage control between team-mates and more like Stella auditing his own strategic call.
Why This Matters More Than a Bit of Wheel-to-Wheel Racing
McLaren sits second in the constructors’ championship, 181 points behind Mercedes and 59 points ahead of Ferrari, so nobody at Woking is panicking about the bigger picture. But Monza was also a reminder that McLaren’s competitive picture away from Mercedes is now genuinely fluid. Verstappen’s Red Bull was faster in a straight fight, Piastri and Norris both struggled with the tow in the middle stint, and the team itself admits it never got remotely close to challenging for the top two.
Against that backdrop, a self-inflicted near miss between team-mates fighting over what was, in the end, a battle for fourth rather than a podium looks like an unforced error McLaren can ill afford to make a habit of. Letting drivers race is a fine principle right up until it costs you a position you might otherwise have had, and Stella now has to decide whether Monza was a one-off or a pattern he needs to actually manage rather than just review after the fact.
Ten races remain this season, starting with the Spanish Grand Prix, and McLaren’s title interest realistically now centres on the constructors’ fight rather than either driver catching Antonelli. Given that, the margin for handing Verstappen and Red Bull free points through internal squabbles is not exactly generous. Stella’s review had better produce more than a shrug and a “we’d do the same again.”
