Heading into the Canadian Grand Prix, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella suggested it was a matter of “when” and not “if” teammates Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, frontrunners in the championship standings, would battle one another on track.
As it turns out, “when” came in Montreal—and the result was disastrous for Norris.
Four laps from the finish of the Canadian Grand Prix, Norris attempted to pass Piastri down the main straight at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. But the opening closed up—or rather, never was there at all—and Norris slammed into the back of his teammate. His front wing snapped and he came to a halt, retiring from the race and allowing George Russell of Mercedes to take the win under safety car conditions. Piastri held position and finished fourth.
Piastri and Norris come together in Canada! 😱
— Formula 1 (@F1) June 15, 2025
Here's the collision between the two McLarens 💥#F1 #CanadianGP pic.twitter.com/sKo3GRQ63Q
The inevitable finally happened. Norris and Piastri clashed. But that didn’t result in any sort of sigh of relief at McLaren.
“Well, we never want to see a McLaren car involved in an accident and definitely we don’t want to see the two McLarens having contact, so this situation is a situation that we know is not acceptable,” Stella said at the conclusion of the race.
Norris rightfully took the blame for the incident almost immediately on the team radio and again when speaking to reporters. Piastri appreciated the 25-year-old quickly owning up to the mistake and said as much when Norris approached him in the media pen to apologize. McLaren CEO Zak Brown commended Norris for his “candor,” even if it didn’t change the outcome.
“Like I said, we appreciate his behavior straight after the accident and we will go racing again,” Stella added.
In the grand scheme of teammate battles, Sunday’s outcome was far from the worst. It wasn’t Lewis Hamilton vs. Nico Rosberg or Ayrton Senna vs. Alain Prost, incidents that wrecked both cars on the same team out of the same race. McLaren’s crash was perhaps most recently reminiscent of Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo slamming into the back of a young Max Verstappen at the 2018 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but even that incident eliminated both drivers.
Still, the reality of the situation is that McLaren can’t just have its two cars “go racing again.” At least not in the same way.
McLaren has touted the self-dubbed “Papaya Rules” as its guidelines for racing, taking an approach of allowing Norris and Piastri to race—with an emphasis on keeping battles clean and fair—when the two come into proximity with one another. The ideology is fairly different from past championship contenders, who either prioritize one driver over another or wholeheartedly work together to maximize points for the team.
It’s easy to hypothesize about what McLaren should have done days after the race, but a missed opportunity from Sunday’s race would have been to prompt Piastri to let Norris pass—at least temporarily—in an effort to allow the faster car at the time to chase after third-place Kimi Antonelli. Should Norris have not been able to catch the Mercedes, the drivers could have easily switched back places before the checkered flag—a strategy McLaren has employed before, including to give Piastri his maiden win at last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix. (Admittedly, it was McLaren’s own misguided strategy that put Piastri into second in Hungary, leading to a rather tense final lap spent convincing a conflicted Norris to give the place back.)
Stella was right to call the move from Norris in Canada a “misjudgment,” but he reasoned that such a mistake meant there was no need for nothing to change the team’s approach. However, McLaren’s performance in Montreal was lackluster all weekend long, beginning with third- and seventh-place finishes in qualifying Saturday. Gone was the apparent edge the team had maintained throughout the opening 10 races of the season, meaning everything had to be flawless come the Grand Prix. And it wasn’t, resulting in a series of missteps that culminated in Norris’s retirement and McLaren’s worst showing of the season (12 points).
Letting teammates race is a part of F1 and fans are the beneficiaries. No one wants to see another driver willingly let another car past, even if it is for the good of a particular team. But McLaren isn’t beholden to the expectations of those watching from the stands or on their TVs. The team’s goal is to hoist two trophies at the end of the season, and preserving both drivers each weekend is the best way to achieve that.
It’s possible Norris and Piastri will come out of the incident with a renewed sense of purpose. The dreaded “incident” is now over and done with and the two could have a better understanding of how to race one another when the situation inevitably arises again. However, with Norris now 22 points adrift of his teammate in the standings and having struggled to put all of the pieces together on multiple occasions this season, he’ll be in a more desperate position. There will be only more cause to take risks and to beat Piastri if he hopes to preserve his chance at his first individual title.
No two F1 races are the same. It’s possible that Montreal will be just a blip on the 2025 calendar when McLaren lifts its second consecutive constructors’ trophy and either Norris or Piastri is etched into history as world champion. But Canada opened up the door to McLaren’s rivals—and a new approach will be needed to slam that door shut again.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as McLaren Must Move On From Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri Incident With a New Approach.
