F1 News
McLaren's timing of Piastri and Norris swap under scrutiny: Stella defends
Andrea Stella has defended McLaren's decision to delay the team orders swap between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri during the sprint race in Brazil. Norris eventually won the race and finished one-two despite an attacking Verstappen and a (potential) safety car threatening to ruin their plans. Stella has explained why they decided to leave it late.
During the first half of the sprint race, Norris sounded annoyed over the team radio. Piastri closed the door at turn one, and the British driver seemed to question Piastri's actions over the team radio. In a post-race interview on F1TV, Stella was grilled about the decision to keep delaying the swap despite them reporting positive delta times to Leclerc in third place.
Stella defends McLaren's plan
"I think there's quite a lot of subjective interpretation in your question, which is fair enough. It's your job. I respect that. But going with the numbers, more objectively, I think if you swap, like we actually saw as soon as we swapped with Oscar, Verstappen was just there. And this is a situation that we wanted to avoid," Stella explained with some frustration.
"So numbers in hand, it would have been very risky to swap when you have the car behind, even 1.5 seconds or something. We were ideally waiting for having a couple of seconds, which never really materialised. And also there was a bit of variation in the gaps between the second and the third. So the situation never really stabilised consistently to execute the manoeuvre with enough margin. If you are a Formula One driver and you are second, you're always going to be a little nervous. So we deeply respect this aspect as well," Stella said before stressing constructive conversations took place with the drivers in the past.
Stella reiterated that Norris was simply just concerned. Stella was pleased to see his driver be worried about the situation given the position in the championship. "When you are second, you would like to get first and forget about the rest. It's a racing driver thing. I would be much more worried right now in this interview if Lando wasn't concerned somehow. Then something is actually out of place. So, happy that he's concerned," Stella concluded.