Commentary: McLaren's F1 Driver Politics Cost Norris, Piastri and the Team As a Whole in Qatar

Seven laps into Sunday's Qatar Grand Prix, the McLaren Formula 1 team found itself in a precarious position. An early safety car meant a crucial chance for its championship-contending drivers, then running first and third, to move onto fresh tires and fight from a position of advantage for the rest of the race.

Yet neither driver pitted, a move that team boss Zak Brown now calls "the wrong decision." The mistake is just the latest in a season of putting individual driver interests over the team.

It was clear by the opening weekend of the year that McLaren would be entering 2025 with the sort of car capable of running away with a championship. But with no clear hierarchy between the team's two drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have spent the year working within the so-called "Papaya Rules" dictating that the team generally does not give priority to its drivers. These arrangements have been the talking point as Norris and Piastri clashed on-track in Canada and again at COTA—but the problem in Qatar was not so much the politics between drivers, as it was the fact that both drivers stayed on the same strategy at all.

Whether or not changing tires would have benefited the driver doing it, McLaren's best interest as a team was to split its drivers by putting one on fresh tires and leaving the other out on older rubber. The best way to do that would have been pitting Piastri and not pitting Norris, ensuring a McLaren was on the same strategy as second-placed Max Verstappen before the Red Bull driver even made a choice. Piastri stayed out, so the opposite decision should have become even easier when Verstappen stopped behind him; with Piastri not pitting, it should fall to Norris as his McLaren teammate to pivot onto the Red Bull driver's strategy and keep Verstappen under pressure from a faster car on equal tires.

Instead, McLaren opted to keep both drivers on equal footing by pitting neither of them. Brown told media that this was the team's preferred strategy rather than a play for fairness, but the end result of the decision is that neither driver was available in-race to act as a hedge on the other's strategy. As the rest of the field's strongest entries stopped for Pirellis, it meant two McLarens out in front of the field were sitting ducks, with no teammates left to fight among the group with fresh tires. Piastri would fall to second behind Verstappen, while Norris would have to settle for fourth. It was not quite as nightmarish an outcome as the Las Vegas disqualification, but it was enough to leave Verstappen just 12 points back of the title, with 25 available in Abu Dhabi next weekend.

McLaren is still in good shape. Norris will win the title with any top three finish, and Piastri can still steal a championship from Verstappen with a win even if Norris fails to finish the race. If one views this as a team willing to let another competitor back into the driver's championship to preserve its plan for an entire season, McLaren is in position to win its driver title without ever fully compromising its plan heading into the year. There is still a question with a race left to run, though, and it is a question that McLaren could have decisively answered by splitting its strategies at Qatar.

Whether Piastri or Norris would have won on fresh tires last Sunday, either result would have denied points to Verstappen and ensured that McLaren was in greater control of the championship picture when the lights go out at Yas Marina. Instead, Papaya Rules discourse survives another week, and McLaren heads to the season finale in the situation it has been on a collision course with since the season began: a contested season finale.

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