The Ross Brawn moment McLaren needed in Hungarian GP team orders tension

Did Andrea Stella miss his chance to lay down the law with Lando Norris as the laps ticked by in Hungary?

Lando Norris’ delay in obeying a McLaren team order resulted in a dilution of the joy of a stellar 1-2 result at the Hungaroring, with the British driver leaving it until just three laps to go to hand back the lead to Oscar Piastri.

The Will Joseph radio message to Lando Norris that hinted at consequences

“Mate, we did the stop sequence in this order for the good of the team,” was the impassioned radio message from Lando Norris’ race engineer Will Joseph as he pleaded with the British driver to cede position to Oscar Piastri.

Having feared the possibility of an undercut – however unlikely – from Lewis Hamilton, McLaren had complicated matters in the closing stages of the race as the Woking-based team brought second-placed Norris in for his final stop before the leading Oscar Piastri.

Undercutting Piastri as a result, it handed track position to Norris at a circuit where track position means everything and, with Piastri’s pace not particularly strong in the final stint, Norris held onto and stretched his lead out front – all while his engineer begged him to swap things back to the way the team wanted.

“I’m trying to protect you mate, I promise, I’m trying to protect you,” was one of Joseph’s messages, which could be viewed as a reminder of the potentially severe consequences that awaited Norris had he not chosen to – eventually – cede the place to the Australian.

“Things are always going to go through your mind because, you know… You’ve got to be selfish in this sport at times. You’ve got to think of yourself,” Norris explained after the chequered flag, admitting that the scenario of complete disobedience had crossed his mind.

“That’s priority number one, is think of yourself. I’m also a team player, so my mind was going pretty crazy at the time. I know what we’ve done in the past between Oscar and myself. He’s helped me plenty of times… I think this is a different situation. This is not someone helping one another. I was put into a position, and we were undoing that position change.

“When you’re thinking of the seven or six points that I give away, then… It crosses your mind for sure. So it was not easy, but I also understood the situation I was in and I was quite confident always by the last lap I would have done it.”

The key admission from that is the final sentence, revealing a possibility in his own mind that, while “confident he would have” given up the place, he could have ignored the order had the pressure not been kept on him by Joseph.

More from the fallout from the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend

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Why didn’t Andrea Stella get on team radio to issue Lando Norris order?

What was particularly interesting was that, throughout the entire radio exchange, with Joseph’s desperation turning towards appealing towards Norris’ emotions and conscience, team boss Andrea Stella never felt the need to get on the radio and issue a straightforward order – live and direct from the team boss.

Instead, Stella left the responsibility in the hands of the race engineer, confident that Joseph would get the message across – something he achieved with his promises of “protection” and how Norris would need the team, and Piastri, to keep his hopes of a championship fight alive.

But was this just another additional complication that could have been knocked on the head early on? Having made a mountain out of a molehill with the last stops to cause the situation in the first place, at a time when McLaren had ample time to get both drivers turned around with little risk from the drivers behind unless a pit error was made, was leaving it to Joseph to get his driver to back down firm enough in execution?

The master of this, from years gone by, was Ross Brawn, who was no stranger to issuing team orders during his time as technical director at Ferrari as he would mercilessly order Rubens Barrichello aside for the betterment of Michael Schumacher’s championship.

In 2013, then the team boss of Mercedes, Brawn intervened over team radio to firmly order Nico Rosberg to hold station as the German driver argued to be allowed to overtake Lewis Hamilton in the closing stages of the Malaysian Grand Prix – an authoritative line that left Rosberg in no doubt as to what his role as an employee of the Mercedes F1 team was to do.

Stella chose not to take a similar approach and, after the race, explained he had never had any doubt in Norris that he would do the right thing.

“No. I know Lando enough,” he said, when asked about the scenario unfolding with Norris retaining the lead to take the win at the chequered flag – a position that would have played into his hands in the Drivers’ Championship as Norris aims to close down Verstappen.

“I know that, when you have a race driver and you deal with a race driver, sometimes you have to communicate with all the sides that exist inside the race driver.

“But I know enough and well enough that, inside Lando, we have the race driver and the team player. These two elements came along perfectly today to generate what was the right thing to do for the team, for Oscar, and for Lando.

“So we are very happy from this point of view, you know that no race driver is such by nature that would say, ‘Okay, then, when are we going to do that?’

“They always hope – they are P1 in a Formula 1 Grand Prix, and they hope like, ‘Oh, maybe the team will let me get it’.

“But we were very clear already, before the race. So it’s a situation that I think it proves, it shows, and it demonstrates once again, what it means to be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team.

“These are the values – sometimes they conflict with some instincts of a race driver. But the values, the culture, and the good for the team stays always the most important thing.”

But this is a very easy stance to take in retrospect, safe in the knowledge that Norris had given back the place – whether he had always intended to do so, or caved under the barrage of begging coming into his ears.

Given that Norris could easily have challenged for the race win on merit had he given back the place to Piastri far earlier had he utilised his superior pace to try getting back ahead, allowing Norris to circulate up front in a position the team didn’t want him in, maintaining a poker face of confidence that Norris would obey – it put the team in a precarious position had a late Safety Car occurred.

On top of the risk of a Safety Car were the constant radio messages required to talk Norris around – which seemed to require far more appealing to Norris’ humanity than would be the case if Stella was so sure his driver would do the right thing.

It would have been all too easy for one of those messages to prove a distraction and result in an error from the leader, which would have been disastrous – on top of the lost result would be the fact Norris wouldn’t have been able to prove the intentions he says he had, which would have created even more unnecessary fallout.

Andrea Stella: If you mess up on principles, you cannot be part of McLaren

Stella has been particularly critical of the approach Red Bull has had with keeping Max Verstappen in check over the years. But his own approach towards handling the situation created by McLaren, in real-time, was not significantly different – Stella relied on the conscience of his driver, rather than his own authority as team boss. If Norris was as hard-nosed as Verstappen, or the likes of Sebastian Vettel in the past, the outcome would have been very different.

One critical message from Joseph that seemed to land for Norris was when the race engineer said: “Just remember every single Sunday morning meeting we’ve had.”

Stella revealed afterward some of what is imprinted on the drivers in these meetings, saying: “We have discussions with our race drivers before every race.

“The discussion we have is about our principles, because it’s very difficult to manage Formula 1 races if you only talk about rules like ‘The car ahead has priority at the stop’, you really risk boxing yourself into a problem as every driver desperately tries to be ahead at the first corner, because then they want the priority.

“We talk about our principles, going racing – one principle, just to make an example, I don’t want to disclose too much but this one is simple, is the interest of the team comes first.

“If you mess up on this matter, you cannot be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team. That’s the principles. Then we reaffirm some of the ways in which we corroborate the messages, for instance, that we use in case we need to solve situations like this. And that’s what we do before the race.”

Stella put a lot of faith in his driver to do the ‘right’ thing on this occasion, adding weight to his position that McLaren is setting about its racing in a principled fashion. Norris, on this occasion, clearly took Joseph’s words on board and decided to stay on the right side of the team for the sake of seven points.

But, if Norris ends up closing up significantly on Verstappen as the season progresses, will he really move aside again? And, if he doesn’t, would Stella have the mettle to punish Norris as a title bid continues?

For now, that scenario remains, thankfully for McLaren, a hypothetical. But Stella had the chance to publicly make a point of order to Norris as a figure of authority in the closing stages of the Hungarian GP, at a point where Norris wilfully ignoring it placed the 1-2 at risk – and opted against.

It’s not what Ross Brawn did on numerous occasions but, given that Stella worked closely with Brawn at Ferrari as performance engineer for Michael Schumacher during the peak intensity of the team order years, it seems Stella has chosen to forge his own path, and leaves the driver to make the calls based on the principles he’s drilled into them.

It’s an admirable way of going racing and, on this occasion, it didn’t backfire – due to Norris’ personality. But would Stella have made life easier for everyone involved if he’d simply got on the radio to order Norris to get back behind Piastri – ‘Now’, rather than ‘”At your convenience”?

It’s tough to argue that McLaren’s 1-2 wouldn’t have been overshadowed by the mess had he opted for that single moment of authoritative heavy-handedness.

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