McLaren will review whether early Norris pit stop led to ‘unacceptable’ clash

McLaren’s drivers will be reminded they should never make contact with each other after the pair touched during today’s Italian Grand Prix.

Team principal Andrea Stella said they will review the contact which occurred after Oscar Piastri left the pits and touched the back of his team mate’s car at the first corner.

“It’s obviously not ideal,” said Piastri. “Fortunately we both were fine after. Of course the intention is never to get that close.”

Piastri had just come out of the pits after changing to hard tyres when the contact occurred. He had just lost a position to his teammate Lando Norris, who pitted before him, and therefore gained the benefit of running on fresh tyres earlier.

“I braked where I braked and I couldn’t really slow down much more than that,” Piastri explained. “I was at the limit of locking up and it was tight. In the end, nothing happened so I’m sure we’ll talk about it.”

Norris believed he left Piastri enough room to avoid contact. “I guess he was just on cold tyres or something, so he had a bit of understeer,” he said.

“I left enough of a gap, I think, but it’s impossible to see, it was very difficult to see in the mirror. I left a big gap.

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“But it’s just hard and cold tyres is not a nice combination, and I guess he just ran into my rear tyre, but nothing else.”

Stella made it clear the incident is not acceptable. “There should never, ever be a contact between two McLaren cars,” he said. “There was a contact, which doesn’t fit the way we go racing at McLaren.”

The team will discuss the incident with its two drivers. “It’s okay, you just review things like you do with anything that is technical, operational or racing.

“What is important is to have a clear parameter as to what you deem acceptable and what you deem not acceptable. It’s not an emotional thing, it’s just like you deal with other things, you deal with racing in a similar way. And this is very clear that for any driver, there’s something bigger than them. It’s the team.”

Stella said he will take another look at the incident before deciding whether either driver could have done more to avoid it.

“I need to review,” he said. “Like all things we’ll do it calmly, there’s nothing that we need to do urgently. So we will review, we take the adjustments that we need to take.”

He expects his drivers will also consider how they positioned their cars in the lead-up to the collision. “I’m sure even the drivers will calibrate themselves for a similar situation,” he said.

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“It’s always a little tricky when you leave the pit, especially on hard tyres. Certainly Oscar was trying to see where he could place himself so that he could keep the position but on colder tyres. This could be slightly more difficult than he might have anticipated.

“So we could absolutely conclude that this is just a little misjudgement. Therefore it means there’s no problem at all.

“Both drivers race and they were aware that there must be no contact between two McLarens and it was just an issue with the execution. We all have issues with execution on what we do and when drivers do that, it becomes very visible. But it’s just because they do something difficult and under the spotlight.”

McLaren will also consider whether the decision to pit Norris before Piastri had a bearing on the incident.

“If the contact is due to the fact that there was pressure because of the undercut and so on, then we have something to review. Because it means drivers put the team at risk because of affirming themselves, this is not acceptable.”

Stella explained the reasoning behind the team’s decision to bring Norris in first. “We pitted Lando before Oscar because Lando was the car that was most under pressure when Alonso pitted.

“It wasn’t clear as soon as Alonso would have cleared the AlphaTauri, how fast he would have been. So we wanted to make sure that we had two McLarens ahead of Alonso. So that’s why you go this kind of sequence.”

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