McLaren to continue to allow Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri to split F1 strategies

McLaren will continue to let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri split race strategies at the Dutch Grand Prix, despite the consequences it may have on their Formula 1 title battle.

Norris scored an unlikely win in the Hungarian Grand Prix after switching to a one-stop strategy while running outside of the podium spots in fourth place.

Although Piastri was faster at the end of the race on fresher tyres, the tight and twisty nature of the Hungaroring F1 track meant that he was unable to find a way past Norris, leaving him seven-tenths adrift in second.

The result tightened the title fight between the McLaren duo, slashing Piastri’s points lead to nine heading into the summer break.

The Woking-based squad has always maintained that it will allow Norris and Piastri to freely race each other in 2025, under certain conditions, but the Hungarian GP exposed some unintended consequences of its approach.

Norris revealed that McLaren held internal discussions after Budapest, but concluded that there was no need to change the ‘papaya rules’ that govern how its drivers can race against each other.

“At the minute, things have not really changed,” he said at Zandvoort.

“Of course, there were discussions, there's been reviews of things all along the season. Every race, we make tweaks to things, and we have a good understanding as a team. That happens every time. That happened after Budapest. 

“There's no major changes, but we still have constructors' [championship] to win, and that's priority at this point.”

Norris explained that he was forced into switching strategy mid-race after dropping behind Mercedes rival George Russell, but he couldn’t have anticipated that a one-stop strategy would propel him to victory.

“Budapest was a bit of an outlier; my decision to go on to the one-stop was more [out of circumstances],” he said.

“You'd have to be pretty daft if I was to box after everyone else ahead of me had boxed, just to follow suit and do nothing different. You don't need to even be smart to do something different.

“So it was more to get ahead of George, to give myself an opportunity to be ahead of him at that point. Not necessarily to win the race at that point. So it was pretty amazing that it turned out that way, and it was a perfect result. 

“I didn't make that decision at the time thinking, ‘ok, this is my race and I can try and win it now’.

“Maybe it was not a perfect harmonic race between us as a team because it didn't kind of fall exactly into the place of what we would normally go by. But at the same time, it was just an example of what can happen in racing sometimes.

“I think we both want as drivers for things not to be overly straight, and we don't want to just not be able to race because we're also here as individuals to race and prove who can do a better job. “

Oscar Piastri on McLaren's strategy split

Piastri also confirmed that both he and Norris would be free to opt for different strategies during a race.

However, he also revealed that McLaren had held productive talks about different scenarios to make things as fair as possible between the two.

“We've spoken about it since then," he told the media, including Crash.net. "Ultimately, there are race situations where being the second car from the team on track - you don't even have to be the second car from your team.

“It's just being the kind of the last car in the train, or the last car in the group, you've got a lot less to lose. So that kind of aspect is always going to be there. It would be unfair to neutralise that just because of not wanting to be on the same strategy.

“There were discussions about whether there was anything we could have done differently for myself, which were very productive discussions.

“We're still gonna be free to pick alternative strategies if that's what we want, But yes, there were definitely some discussions about how we can tackle that because it's obviously a difficult thing to try and cover different strategies, especially when you're in the position you are in the championship.”