recovered from a sloppy qualifying at Monza to finish fourth and fifth in the Italian Grand Prix, but the bigger story was what the pit wall chose not to do. With Lando Norris and on the same tyres and the same car, team principal Andrea Stella left them free to race rather than impose an order in the closing laps.
Norris started eighth and finished fourth. Piastri started sixth and took fifth, 0.137 seconds behind. Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli won from 19th, George Russell was second and held third. McLaren scored 22 points and left Italy arguing that execution, not team orders, decided the afternoon.
On Saturday, team principal Andrea Stella blamed poor execution for a Q3 that left Piastri sixth and Norris eighth. Piastri had been third before a three-place grid drop for impeding Liam Lawson. The MCL40 was also weak on Monza’s long straights.
Sunday was cleaner. The pair moved forward in a race packed with slipstream fights and battery management.
“I think this is a race in which we executed racing better than what we did yesterday,” Stella said. “Yesterday in Qualifying we should have qualified certainly better than a P6/P8 on the grid. And we reviewed that with the team and with the drivers, and we said to ourselves that today, from an execution point of view, we should have done better and operated higher standards.”
Pierre Gasly had taken a shock pole but slipped to seventh. For McLaren, starting mid-pack at Monza meant every pass cost time and energy.
Late in the race, Lando Norris wanted a run at Max Verstappen. The team decided he had to earn it on track.
“I think in this situation, we thought that for Lando to be able to have a chance on Max, he should firstly be able to pass Oscar,” Stella said. “And the two cars were on the same tyres, same tyre age, same car. So we thought there was no need to interfere with the normal development of the race. We let them race.”
“We think that was the right thing to do. I think overall Max was faster, he was just caught in this loop that you have when you lose the slipstream here in Monza, and you have to use the energy to defend from someone else.”
Norris made the move stick on the final lap with a late power-unit boost. Piastri stayed right with him to the flag.
On lap 51, Norris put two wheels on the grass at Curva Grande and radioed that Piastri had pushed him off. After the race, he accepted the defence was fair. Stella agreed.
“The moment in which Lando put the wheels on the grass, he came on the radio, he made a comment like he pushed me off or something. But actually, when we reviewed it, I think we saw that the episode is much more benign than what it might have looked in the heat of the moment.”
“So I think it’s something that certainly we will review, and we will review in the context of this kind of racing. As soon as you fight with each other, then you may lose time. So was there a better way for McLaren to give a fight to Verstappen? We will review. It wasn’t obvious to us on the pit wall, and we thought that it was more important to let them race according to our philosophy of going racing.”
Stella also saw a step from after a few awkward races in this year’s car.
“I think it’s a race that confirms a trajectory with Oscar,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of races in which we saw that for the requirements of this year’s car, especially in the race when the car slides, we needed to make some adaptations to his natural driving style.”
The next stop is Madrid. Stella does not expect Monza-style drag to decide that race, and he is not getting carried away by the table.
“I think our tracks will be more the likes of Malaysia, Austin, Brazil,” he said. “In Zandvoort and Hungary we were in position to win races, and here, while we were not, we know that it’s a special race. Drag will be less important in Madrid. But from a championship point of view, I think we have to remain very realistic,don’t get conditioned by looking at the classification, just focus on one race at a time.”
