Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff believes McLaren needs to decide if it will throw its full backing behind Lando Norris in his fight for the title.
Norris qualified on pole for Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix but was overtaken in turn four on the opening lap by team-mate Oscar Piastri as Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc ultimately went on to take an emotional victory in front of the tifosi.
With reigning champion and title contender Max Verstappen struggling to sixth in a sluggish Red Bull, it was an opportunity missed for Norris to take a healthy chunk out of the Dutchman’s championship lead.
The gap sits at 62 points with nine races remaining and, with McLaren itself only eight points behind Red Bull in the constructors’ standings, the team is keen to maximise its advantage at any given opportunity.
Wolff, who has dealt with duelling team-mates down the years, sympathised with McLaren and feels it is a catch-22 situation to having two drivers battling it out on track.
“I think as a racing team that is battling at the front suddenly, you are between a rock and a hard place because on one side they are racers like we are racers. We want to make sure that the best man wins but on the other side when it starts to become dysfunctional and impacting your team performance then how do you react to that,” Wolff said in Monza.
“The team is always on the losing end because if you freeze positions and have team orders then you have maybe not what our racing soul wants to do but the rational side needs to prevail.
“At the end you don’t want to lose out on a championship by three or five points that you could have easily made. So walking that tightrope is so difficult and there is no universal truth of how to handle it.”
Wolff said McLaren counterpart Andrea Stella may now have to dampen his racing instincts after the Italian said he wants to review Piastri’s first lap overtake before deciding if it complied with its ‘Papaya Rules’ code of conduct.
“There is nobody that understands sport more than Andrea. He has seen it all of that pan out in front of his eyes multiple times at Ferrari,” added Wolff, referring to Stella's stint at the Maranello squad between 2000-2014.
“He has that racers’ soul that doesn’t want to do it and wants to let them race but I think they are going to come to some conclusion after this race, how are we handling this? This is when we started to introduce the rules of engagement and then we changed the wording to racing intent because ‘rules’ was too harsh as a word for the drivers.”
