The hidden Oscar Piastri record overshadowed by McLaren team orders drama
Oscar Piastri holds the advantage over McLaren teammate Lando Norris in the F1 2025 title race
Oscar Piastri’s pit stop in the closing laps of the Italian Grand Prix was the fastest of the entire F1 2025 season so far, it has emerged.
It came just moments before McLaren performed one of the slowest for Piastri’s teammate Lando Norris, setting up a dramatic finish to the race at Monza.
Oscar Piastri’s Italian Grand Prix pit stop the fastest of F1 2025
McLaren missed out on victory for the first time since June’s Canadian Grand Prix last weekend as Max Verstappen, the Red Bull driver and reigning four-time World Champion, secured his third win of F1 2025.
Norris and Piastri were forced to settle for second and third at Monza after a McLaren team orders controversy.
McLaren parted with standard procedure by pitting Piastri first on Lap 45, despite the Australian being behind Norris on track, to protect him from the threat of fourth-placed Charles Leclerc.
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Norris followed in a lap later, but a slow stop saw him drop behind his teammate when he re-emerged from the pit lane.
McLaren instructed Piastri over team radio to return second place to Norris, with the swap taking place on the main straight.
The result means Norris has reduced Piastri’s lead in the standings to 31 points with eight rounds remaining.
It has emerged that Piastri’s stop at Monza was the quickest of the F1 2025 season to date, with McLaren requiring just 1.91 seconds to service the No. 81 car.
That beat the previous best pit stop of the season – a 1.94-second effort – also performed by McLaren with Norris’s car at last month’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
McLaren and Norris continue to hold the record for the fastest stop in F1 history, a 1.80-second stop at the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix.
By comparison, Norris’s stop at the Italian Grand Prix took 5.87 seconds, setting up a dramatic end to the race.
Speaking after the race, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella vowed to “review all the data” from Norris’s slow stop.
And he claimed that the team’s decision to delay its stops until the end of the race, in the hope of a Safety Car or red flag vaulting its cars ahead of Verstappen, meant it was necessary to pit Piastri first.
More on McLaren drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris from PlanetF1.com
He told PlanetF1.com’s Thomas Maher and other publications at Monza: “With Lando, I think even despite the pit stop, if we do the calculations, with such a strong undercut power that you have on a new soft [tyre], he could have recovered quite a bit of the time lost at the pit stop.
“I think here we go not even in the seconds, we go in the tenths of a second, so for us it was relatively simple to say the the intent was that we’re not going to swap positions.
“That’s why there’s the slow pit stop compounds with this intent.
“In terms of the pit stop itself, we will review all the data that we have available and pick up whatever learning we have for the future.
“Obviously, stopping to cover Leclerc [who made his only stop on Lap 33] would have been the simple solution to the way the race would have unfolded.
“But it would have limited the result, so we wanted to find a way today to pursue a bigger result.
“In the 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 pit stop in a different way compared to the order in which our two drivers were.”
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