Team orders at McLaren, yes or no: What Oscar Piastri hoped to get from his radio messages in the Formula 1 race in Japan and why there were no team orders after all
“I think I’m fast enough to catch Max Verstappen.” Oscar Piastri radioed to the McLaren pits during the final phase of the 2025 Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka. What he wanted to achieve: a team strategy in his favor to pass teammate Lando Norris and move up to second place. But it didn’t happen.
“To be honest, I didn’t really expect it either,” Piastri told Sky. ”I just said what I thought. I felt like I might be able to attack Max because my pace felt very strong and I was able to get into the DRS window relatively comfortably [behind Norris]. I just couldn’t get any closer than that. So I thought I’d at least ask the question.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella considers this “fair”, as he emphasizes on Viaplay. “But in fact, Lando tried to get closer to Max, then let the tires cool down a bit and then try again. But as soon as you get within a second, it gets pretty difficult.”
No chance against Max Verstappen?
But to drive up and overtake, these are two different things in Formula 1, says Stella: “You need about seven to eight tenths of a second advantage to overtake, and I think these numbers were beyond the realm of possibility for Lando and Oscar. So we just held our positions.”
For Piastri, not having a team strategy is “perfectly fine”. He says: “We all want to race and finish where we deserve. I think we can both say that after qualifying, we deserved exactly this result.”
In qualifying, Norris had set the better lap time by 0.032 seconds and finished second ahead of Piastri. This order was also maintained after the Grand Prix start and remained so for the rest of the race. According to Stella, this was also due to the strategy: “It was a straightforward one-stop race and there weren’t many strategic options.”
McLaren fears an attack from behind
That’s why McLaren set up the race with Piastri facing partly towards the rear and brought him in as the first driver from the leading group to change tires. Piastri explains: “I had drivers behind me who had already stopped. We didn’t want to take any big risks there.”
“I was already struggling a bit on the medium tires, and we had been on them for quite a long time. And I don’t think an even longer stint would have done much good. We will certainly analyze whether we could have done something differently, but frankly, I think we drove a good race.”
The defeat against Verstappen in the Red Bull shows only “that every little mistake is enough, and the competition is immediately there to take advantage of it,” says Piastri. Nevertheless, McLaren is still in “very strong shape”. This is underlined by the current standings in the Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship.
