McLaren and Formula One could do with anything decisive in the championship battle between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri being decided on the track and without reference to the pit wall as the title run-in begins at the Circuit of the Americas on Friday.
With the Singapore Grand Prix’s doubtless extensive and tense debriefs dealt with, McLaren will be hoping for a reset. Norris was almost certainly more than aware of the historical context of his riposte to his aggrieved teammate at the last grand prix weekend. In a fiercely contested title fight with the Australian, that Norris invoked one of Ayrton Senna’s most famous sentiments was lost on no one but the incident that provoked his comment was of an entirely different nature to those that defined the Brazilian’s great rivalries.
“If you fault me for just going on the inside of a big gap then you should not be in Formula One,” Norris said of his opening-lap attempt to pass that led to the cars colliding. The remark appeared to paraphrase Senna’s “If you no longer go for a gap that exists you are no longer a racing driver” defence he gave to Sir Jackie Stewart after he ploughed into Alain Prost at Suzuka in 1990, ensuring he took the title.
While the spirit is similar, the wording is where the similarities end. Senna later admitted he had no intent of letting Prost beat him through the first corner while Norris did try to make his pass cleanly at the Marina Bay circuit. Indeed, it was a perfectly valid effort that went unpenalised even with the glancing blow he made against his McLaren teammate as he went through. That itself was a result of him clipping the Red Bull of Max Verstappen in front of him.
Piastri reacted furiously and, notably, immediately declared that Norris gaining the place was “unfair”; the implication being that the two teammates clashing was verboten under McLaren’s rules of engagement and Norris should be instructed to give back the place he had made. McLaren did not do so, but it was indicative that in any cases of contention between the two, both will promptly appeal to the team to intervene on his behalf.
This is part and parcel of McLaren’s laudable efforts to let their drivers race one another and to try to be as scrupulously fair . Quite apart from tying some torturous knots in setting precedents over what constitutes fair or unfair – which, under these auspices, now includes misfortune, strategy and racing incidents such as in Singapore – there is the question of perception.
Of most import to the title race, with six meetings remaining Piastri leads Norris by 22 points, there is what each driver perceives as fair and at what point their opinion may diverge with that of the McLaren pitwall. Which is when the amicable relationship between the two may – finally – become a little bit more Senna-Prost.
The Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, said after Singapore: “It’s going to come to a situation where a few points will matter. Then they’ll start to calculate and back-calculate and I guess the elbows are going to come out a bit more. That’s when it starts to get interesting.”
For the audience, in what is a two-horse race, getting interesting will probably be welcomed in the form of an on-track confrontation rather than a spreadsheet-based arbitration of circumstances. Not least because for F1 the other impression from all this is not particularly rousing.
To be fair, McLaren are making the correct decisions for themselves and it has paid off. They secured their 10th constructors’ title in Singapore (albeit a brilliant success overshadowed by the fuss prompted by the Norris-Piastri moment) and in Andrea Stella as team principal they have an ethical and principled leader who genuinely wants to do the right thing.
Yet having drivers in a championship fight looking to the pitwall to decide matters is unedifying. Their contest should be decided on track. Chance and fate will play their part, but better to let them simply go at it and see how fortune falls, than the impression that every disputed moment will be pored over by the team to ascertain whether they need to intervene and then cleared up afterwards behind closed doors.
The scrutiny will intensify and each time it happens it is in danger of potentially making a difference that could be critical. Already, after the team made their drivers swap places at Monza because Norris had endured a slow pit stop and Piastri feeling he had been hard done by with the strategy call at Hungary, where Norris won, the spectre of a fear of favouritism also looms.
No one wants to see a title endlessly debated because it may be considered that the efforts to be fair had not been balanced. When asked if he felt the team had managed to do right by both drivers, Piastri said he believed they had, but noted that it was an ever-evolving approach.
“There’s been some difficult situations and we’ve spoken about a number of things,” he said after Singapore. “But ultimately it’s a learning process with the whole team.”
Six meetings remain. McLaren have little wriggle room left to do their cramming, so it may be better now to simply close the books and step back from the fray.
