Martin Brundle raises Monza question after Oscar Piastri title loss

Martin Brundle has questioned whether McLaren’s controversial driver swap at Monza played a role in Oscar Piastri’s F1 title defeat.

The Italian Grand Prix was overshadowed by McLaren ordering then-championship leader Piastri to give second place back to teammate Lando Norris after the Briton lost the position due to suffering a slow pit stop.

McLaren had taken the unconventional approach of pitting Piastri first despite him not being the lead car (after running it by Norris) in order to protect a 2-3 finish behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, but things went awry when McLaren botched Norris’s pit stop.

Piastri subsequently endured a dramatic dip in form and failed to finish on the podium at the following six events as he missed out on a maiden world championship to Norris.

This run included a disastrous weekend in Azerbaijan, where Piastri crashed out of qualifying and the race. The Australian later admitted that McLaren’s team orders in Italy were still on his mind at the next race in Baku.

“Did Monza impact Piastri in the run-in?” Brundle wrote in his Sky Sports F1 column following the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

“Norris still doesn't have Piastri's absolute laser guided and bold overtaking, and in many races Oscar took his turn to be undisputed class of the field with sensational victories in China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Miami, Spain, Belgium, and, tellingly, his last of the season nine races ago in the Netherlands in August.

“In Monza, he was asked to hand back a place to Lando after pit stops. For me it was a very clear decision by the team. They asked Lando to yield his priority pit stop, due to being the lead McLaren, over to Oscar to help his team-mate defend against Charles Leclerc's closing Ferrari, with a promise of no undercut.

“Lando played the team game and said 'yes' despite it being against his own best interests and it duly happened. Piastri received the first pit stop in 1.9 seconds and, somehow inevitably, Norris' took a yawning 5.9 seconds and there was indeed an undercut and Piastri was ahead.

“The team corrected that back out on track. Of course, a slow pit stop is just part of any Grand Prix season but this one was delivered under specific circumstances. At least Piastri was now back in Norris' DRS range and was told he was free to race, and so still a net gain. Norris duly pulled away because he was the faster car/driver combo on the day.

“If Oscar's head dropped because of that then he shouldn't have let that happen. At the next race he had a nightmare with two trips to the wall and a jumped start in Baku, and he wouldn't see the GP podium again until Qatar, a race weekend when he was head and shoulders above the pack, but only second place in the end due to the team choosing not to pit under the Lap 7 Safety Car.

“Two factors created this fallow phase for Oscar, firstly a generally accepted fact that on low grip surfaces he's yet to maximise his full potential, but also Max Verstappen and Red Bull found a rich vein of form in winning six of the last nine starts.”

Brundle praises Norris turnaround

The McLaren drivers’ second half of the season could not have contrasted more greatly, with Norris remarkably turning around a 34-point deficit following his retirement at the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August.

In the same time Piastri failed to finish on the podium, Norris claimed superb two victories in Mexico and Brazil and finished in the top three on a further two occasions.

“Lando made a big step forward in mind management this season, and he began to regularly convert pole position into the lead at the end of the first lap, a good example of which was Mexico's enormous run down to the first corner whilst slipstreaming the whole pack behind from pole position,” Brundle continued.

“He placed his car extremely well, narrowly ahead in a four-wide pack, then braked in the right place by just the right amount, claimed the first chicane cleanly and then simply dominated the race with ease.

“He handled pressure situations much better, whether it was in qualifying, racing, or indeed out of the car. He gradually stopped being so publicly hard on himself which was only feeding his rivals. But he still stayed true to who he is and how he wants to behave in racing and learned to diffuse those moments when he wanted to berate himself to the world.

“His racecraft has always been good and that was ramped up this year with more incisive overtakes and defending, and tyre management such as his Pirelli whispering victory in Budapest, much to Piastri's chagrin.”