Will McLaren change ‘free to race’ policy after Canada clash?

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will continue to be free to race each other despite their intra-team collision at the F1 Canadian Grand Prix.

F1 title rivals Norris and Piastri came to blows for the first time this year as they battled over fourth place in the closing stages of Sunday’s race in Montreal.

Norris hit the rear of Piastri’s car as he attempted to overtake his teammate down the pit straight and sustained race-ending damage, while Piastri was able to finish fourth after pitting under the subsequent Safety Car.

McLaren have no plans to change their policy regarding how their drivers go racing, having maintained a clash between Norris and Piastri was inevitable.

“Being free to race and being clear as to how we go racing is a value of racing and is a value of racing that we want to try and exercise and respect as much as we can, rather than every time that we have a proximity between the two cars, then having control from the people,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella insisted.

“I think like that, racing may soon become a bit of an artifact and we want to give Lando and Oscar opportunities to race and opportunities to be at the end of the season in the position that they deserve to be in, based on their merit, based on their performance, based on the racing quality that they have expressed through the season, rather than being at the end of the season and realising that the points have been controlled more by the team rather than the quality of their driving.

“This is not necessarily a simple and straight exercise, but we want to try and do it as best as we can. So I don’t foresee that today’s episode will change our approach from this point of view.”

Internal review will make McLaren ‘stronger’

Norris accepted total blame for the incident and apologised to both Piastri and McLaren.

Stella, who described Norris’s move as a “misjudgement”, believes McLaren will emerge from the coming together stronger after carrying out an internal review.

“If anything, it will reinforce and it will strengthen that the principles we have [to] require more caution by our drivers,” Stella added.

“Because if we say that there should be no contact between the two McLarens, we need to have the margins to make sure that we have no contact, even if in a DRS situation, the car may get almost a little bit sucked onto the other car and cause this kind of misjudgement as to the distance.

“In every situation, in the heat of the moment, that looks like the worst disaster ever. But in reality, the strength of being racers, the strength that comes from having a strong culture, is the fact that you will process the episodes, you will review, you will take all the positive learning and you will dismiss anything that doesn’t have to come with us into the way we go racing in the future.

“This is the mindset that we all have at McLaren and I think this has been proven by the way Lando handled the situation and definitely that’s going to be the kind of conversation that we will not only have with our drivers, but this is the kind of conversations that we will have with the entire team.

“We lean on our culture, which is very strong, and we use these episodes, once they are a little chilled and our mind is colder than it is in the heat of the moment, to become a stronger team with two stronger drivers.”