McLaren's plea to its drivers after Canada clash

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s lesson from their Canadian Grand Prix collision needs to be to leave each other more margin for misjudgement, according to their Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella.

But McLaren has no intention of restricting how the pair race against each other as their title fight continues.

McLaren chief Zak Brown had predicted on The Race F1 Podcast back in April that a collision between his drivers was inevitable given the nature of their championship battle and how closely matched they are.

After various minor flashpoints, it actually happened in Montreal on Sunday as Norris clipped Piastri while trying to line him up for a late race pass for fourth and consequently clattered into the pitwall and out of the race.

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Stella acknowledged how quickly Norris had apologised to Piastri and McLaren for an incident he immediately took full responsibility for, and suggested all the discussions of how they should race each other would now have more resonance now that a clash had been “experienced” rather than just “talked about”.

“I think it will make us more robust,” said Stella. “As a team and in terms of each of our two drivers against these situations because the two McLarens racing close to one another, it will happen again.

“But there will have to be better judgement in terms of the distance - because today, in effect, it's just a matter of distance between the two cars.

“There's nothing like one driver wanted to demonstrate something else; if anything, the dangerous situation was more approaching the last chicane when they were side by side, and I saw some wisdom there.

“But somehow after that...and we know that with the DRS there could be some misjudgments that we have seen in the past as well.”

Asked by The Race if there was any chance that the clash might make McLaren more open to imposing a team order in the future - as it could have done by asking them to focus on passing Kimi Antonelli for third in Canada over battling each other - Stella said being free to race was “a value of racing that we want to try and exercise and respect as much as we can”.

He argued that “racing may soon become a bit of an artifact” if “every time that we have a proximity between the two cars” McLaren tried to orchestrate their fight from the pitwall.

“We want to give Lando and Oscar opportunities to race and opportunities to be at the end of the season in the position that they deserved to be in based on their merit, based on their performance, based on the racing quality that they have expressed through the season, rather than being at the end of the season and realise that the points have been controlled more by the team rather than the quality of their driving,” Stella said.

“This is not necessarily a simple and straight exercise, but we want to try and do it as best as we can.

“So I don't foresee that today's episode will change our approach from this point of view. If anything, it will reinforce and it will strengthen that the principle we have requires more caution by our drivers.”

Stella suggested McLaren’s reaction might have been different had Norris not instantly taken responsibility and apologised.

As he did, it can focus instead on helping him bounce back from the latest self-inflicted blow to his title challenge.

“This may have an impact in terms of his confidence, but it's up to us as a team to show our full support to Lando,” Stella admitted.

“And on this one I want to be completely clear, it's full support to Lando; we will have conversations, and the conversations may be even tough, but there's no doubt over the support we give to Lando and over the fact that we will preserve our parity and equality in terms of how we go racing at McLaren between our two drivers.

“The situation would be different if Lando would have not taken responsibility and apologised.

“Lando himself will have to show his character to overcome this kind of episode, make sure that he only takes the learnings, he only takes what will make him a stronger driver, and dismisses anything which will be a little bit of, how to say, residual, a little bit of any influence for the future which may not simply be good learning.”