McLaren's perfect weekend

It's not often that a team locks out the front row of the grid and then goes on to finish first and second in a Grand Prix. The last time McLaren managed it was 17 years ago, in the 2007 Italian Grand Prix, when Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton led the field in both qualifying and the race. On that day, Andrea Stella, now Team Principal at McLaren, was working for Ferrari as Kimi Raikkonen's performance engineer. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and the engineer who hails from Orvieto in Italy left Maranello for Woking at the end of 2014, when those two teams were arch enemies. Since then, Stella has worked his way up the McLaren team ladder to his current position at its helm. 

The only shadow, if it can be described as that, over this papaya weekend was the way the drivers' relative positions were managed after their second and final pit stops, when Lando Norris found that the team's strategy had led to him undercutting Oscar Piastri to be in front. That triggered a radio conversation broadcast to the world between those on the pit wall and the two drivers. It was very calm and polite in contrast to the more heated “discussions” between Max Verstappen and his race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, that were taking place at the same time, but that's another story. McLaren's discussion was hardly trivial as it would decide which driver would win the race. Who should it be, Lando, who was leading at the time with a good chance of closing the gap to the championship leader, or Oscar who had led up until that point and had been assured by the team that the undercut to which they subjected him, would not jeopardise his chances of a first Formula 1 win?

In the end, the decision of the Court, sorry, of the team, prevailed and Lando let his team-mate by with four laps remaining. We do not know if at the time Stella, who ultimately is responsible for this type of decision, thought back to similar situations he experienced when at Maranello. Ferrari team orders had sparked fierce controversy at Grands Prix such as those in Austria in 2002 and Germany in 2010, when he was a member of the race team. Today, McLaren acted with pragmatism, thinking of what was in the team's best interest in the long term, rather than bowing to potential short term criticism. It was not an easy decision and Andrea would most likely have thought about past events later in the evening, quite likely with a wry smile because the sport's fiercest critics tend to forget that the first responsibility of a team boss, today and in the past, is to secure the best possible result for the team while at the same time ensuring that the team can face the moment in a united and constructive fashion, taking strength from the situation and building on it. A team with such a glorious past as McLaren has to do that if it wants to reach the goals it aspires to in the long term.

Seeing how the drivers reacted at the time, it seems the team has passed the acid test. Of course, Lando won't be happy about giving up a win, because a driver never wants to let another driver pass, least of all his team-mate. Andrea will no doubt speak to them calmly, perhaps remembering conversations between Ferrari's Jean Todt and his drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, or the discussions he himself was involved in with Fernando Alonso and the  then Team Principal, Stefano Domenicali after Hockenheim 2010. Experience always comes in handy…