No more papaya rules? Lando Norris shares fresh McLaren update after team orders

McLaren’s much-touted ‘papaya rules’ do not exist, according to Lando Norris – at least not under a document with that title.

McLaren’s rules of racing made headlines at the Italian Grand Prix when the team instructed Oscar Piastri to cede second place to his teammate after a slow pit stop, due to a wheel nut issue, saw Norris drop behind the championship leader on the track.

Lando Norris: There are no papaya rules anymore

Having courted controversy with its actions, Bernie Ecclestone going as far as to say he’s getting the “the feeling that McLaren prefers a World Champion named Lando Norris,” McLaren defended its stance.

“However the championship goes, what’s important is that the championship runs within the principles and the racing values that we have at McLaren, and that we have created together with our drivers,” said team principal Andrea Stella. “This is what we did, and this is what we think is in compliance with our principles.”

Those principles are in part laid out in McLaren’s ‘papaya rules’.

The term ‘papaya rules’ came to the fore last season as Norris and Piastri vied for the opportunity to fight Max Verstappen for the World title, with McLaren CEO Zak Brown summing it up, saying: “Race each other respectfully, and give each other enough room and don’t touch each other.”

But as the Woking team faced backlash from Sunday’s orders, with Norris booed as he stepped onto the podium, the Briton was asked those ‘papaya rules’.

Key talking points after McLaren’s team orders at Monza

👉 It’s time for Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris to be selfish

👉 McLaren threw ‘papaya rules’ to the wind in Italian Grand Prix team orders call

“There are no papaya rules anymore,” he told DAZN. “We’ve never had them.”

Quizzed on that and whether the document instead had another name, he replied: “Yes. It’s not even a page long, actually.

“The important thing is it says: Fair.

“And this covers many things, fairness for me and for Oscar.

“I don’t choose that these things happen. We don’t care what’s happened in the past, but we do what we think is right for us.”

What felt right for McLaren in Monza was to revert to the running order prior to Norris’ slow pit stop.

Expanding on that moment when he sat stationary for 5.9 seconds, he revealed: “You think about a lot of things.

“It feels like a long time even if it’s short but it’s something outside my control. I can’t do anything about it.

“It’s not what I want nor what the team wants. It makes things complicated, and complicated the positions.

“But it’s what we all as a team, both drivers decided was the right thing to do if it happened. It had to be corrected.

“If it had happened to Oscar. we would have done exactly the same.”

As for Piastri, although he briefly argued his case to his race engineer Tom Stallard, he ceded the position at the second time of asking.

It was, he says, the right thing to do.

“I think for the long term it was the best decision,” he said. “Lando has been ahead of me all weekend and I understand the decision and that’s why I did the swap almost immediately.

“We still have things to discuss, but for me there was no problem.”

“This had been discussed already, yes,” he added. “It’s something we’ve debated about what we’d do in this situation but we still need to clarify it more.”

Finishing behind Norris in third place, Piastri’s lead in the Drivers’ Championship was reduced by three points to 31.

Asked if he is racing with a calculator in hand, the Australian said it’s too early for that with eight races remaining in the F1 2025 season.

“No, it’s still too early to be thinking about that,” he said. “I tried to do the best job possible today and that was finishing P3.”

Read next: Did Lando Norris really deserve to be booed at the Italian Grand Prix?