McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Lando Norris will receive priority over his team mate as he tries to win the world championship.
Norris is the closest driver to championship leader Max Verstappen with eight rounds remaining in the season. The McLaren driver is 62 points off the lead.
His team mate Oscar Piastri lies fourth in the standings, 44 points behind Norris. Piastri finished immediately in front of Norris in two of the last four races, including the Hungarian Grand Prix, which he won.
Norris has gained 19 points on Verstappen since the Austrian Grand Prix. During that time McLaren has won two races and taken three pole positions, while Red Bull have had none of either.
McLaren previously insisted their drivers have been “free to race” up to now. Piastri passed his team mate for the lead of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on the opening lap, but doing so also allowed Charles Leclerc to overtake Norris. The Ferrari driver went on to beat both McLarens to victory.
Ahead of this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Stella indicated that Norris would receive priority from McLaren for the rest of the season to support his bid to catch Verstappen, but did not go as far as confirm he will have full ‘number one’ status.
“The overall concept is we are incredibly determined to win, but we want to win in the right way,” Stella told the BBC.
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“We [will] bias our support to Lando but we want to do it without too much compromise on our principles. Our principles are that the team interest always comes first. Sportsmanship for us is important in the overall way we go racing. And then we want to be fair to both drivers.”
Stella explicitly stressed that the change in policy was to help avoid future situations like the opening lap at Monza, where Norris fell behind a rival car as a result of battling with his team mate.
“What we don’t want to see any more is a situation like in Monza in which we enter a chicane P1 and P2 and we exit P1 and P3,” he explained. “Because that is a detriment to the team.
“The team interests comes first and these are the situations that above all we need to fix because eventually, as a matter of fact, the way we entered the race in Monza left the door open this situation.”
Stella says that Piastri has shown willingness to support his team mate’s title bid.
“The conversations have been very collaborative,” he said.
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“Even when I said to Oscar ‘would you be available to give up a victory?’ He said: ‘It’s painful, but if it’s the right thing to do now, I will do it’. Every driver is hard-wired to go for a victory. So I am always very impressed by the level of team spirit and maturity and collaboration that we found in this period.”
Norris, Stella says, does not want to have complete number one status where Piastri would be required to move over at all times over the rest of the season.
“Lando wants to win because he deserved the victory on track,” Stella said.
“It’s okay to be occasionally supported by your team mate, but you don’t want to use, systematically, ways of adjusting the race just for the sake of the points when your team mate is scoring in a way that he deserves. This is not the way McLaren want to win, or the way Lando wants to win.”
Stella said Norris would be content if he failed to win the championship by a few points that he “could have got with some actions… if those actions were not right at the time.”
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