McLaren boss explains Italian GP team orders call in ‘bigger result’ verdict
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has weighed in on the team orders situation at the 2025 Italian Grand Prix.
The conclusion to the Italian Grand Prix was punctuated by a critical moment that saw McLaren request its drivers swap positions on the race track following a slow pit stop for Lando Norris, who had been the higher-placed of the two competitors.
It was a move that brought with it ample criticism from fans and pundits, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has explained the logic behind the strategy, noting the importance of track position at the end of the race.
Andrea Stella: McLaren ‘wanted to find a way to pursue a bigger result’
Max Verstappen held strong to his pole position at the Italian Grand Prix, converting a strong start into his third victory of the F1 2025 season — but all eyes were on the two drivers behind him coming to the closing moments of the race.
McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri spent most of the event running in second and third, respectively, which led the team to pursue a pit strategy unique to the rest of the field: Both drivers were to hold onto their medium tyres until the final laps of the race. At that point, they’d swap onto softs for the remainder of the race.
The main goal in that instance was to anticipate any potential late-race red flags or safety cars, as that was likely to be McLaren’s best chance of snatching victory from the reigning champion.
No late-race restart took place, but that didn’t mean the team’s stops were without drama.
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Because he was the better placed of the two McLaren drivers, Lando Norris was able to exert more sway on his race strategy; when it was put to him that he should pit before Oscar Piastri, Norris replied, “Do you want to box the other car first?”
The team duly instructed Norris to remain on track, instead calling Piastri in to stop first.
But where Piastri’s stop was clean, Norris’ was not. An issue with the wheel gun at the left front tyre resulted in the Briton returning to the race track behind his Australian teammate — and the team stepped in to request that its drivers swap position.
While Piastri initially sounded a bit miffed on the radio, he did comply with the request.
After the race, both drivers reaffirmed their commitment to the team before all else, but the move nevertheless left a sour taste in the mouths of many onlookers.
Some of those onlookers were located in the paddock and were able to bring their questions to McLaren team principal Andrea Stella in a post-race press conference.
Stella told PlanetF1.com’s Thomas Maher and other publications at Monza: “Had we gone first with Lando, I think even despite the pitstop, if we do the calculations with such a strong undercut power that you have on a new soft, he could have recovered quite a bit of the time lost at the pitstop.
“So I think here, we go, not even in the seconds, we go in the tenths of a second. For us it was relatively simple to say the intent was that we’re not going to swap positions, and that’s why the slow pitstop compounds with this intent.
“In terms of the pitstop itself, we will review all the data that we have available and pick up whatever learning we have for the future.”
Further, to demonstrate the lineage between the 2025 Italian Grand Prix and the 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, Stella added, “Obviously stopping to cover [Charles] Leclerc would have been the simple solution to the way the race would have unfolded, but it would have limited the result.”
Rather, the team wanted “to find a way today to pursue a bigger result, like in case of a red flag, that would have been quite strong with the two McLarens leading. And even in terms of a safety car, up until a certain point it would have been strong.
“And also we wanted to stop late enough to go on softs, because then had there been a late safety car, we would have been on soft with Verstappen on hard.
“So there were incentives from a racing point of view and from an overall result point of view at the end of the race to stay out.
“We stayed out up until the point where we needed to sequence the pitstop in a different way compared to the order in which our two drivers were.”
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