McLaren gets sympathy from $1.6B worth F1 boss as team orders debate intensify after Italian GP 

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff expressed his sympathy to rivals McLaren when it came to the driver management situation that the team is seemingly facing right now. The Woking-based squad now finds itself in a situation where it is battling for the title in 2024.

After making great strides since 2023, the improvements made by McLaren have coincided with Red Bull facing serious concept issues on the car as the season has progressed.

As a result, McLaren is now the best car in F1, while at Monza it appeared that Red Bull had dropped down to being the fourth fastest car. This has meant that while the constructors championship is more or less a foregone conclusion as the gap is now in single digits, there is a possibility that Lando Norris can win the drivers championship as well.

This is where McLaren faces the issue because the team has Oscar Piastri in the other car, who is performing at the same level as his teammate and has taken points off Lando Norris in a couple of races. There has been a clamor from F1 pundits imploring the Woking-based squad to employ team orders.

Rival Toto Wolff was also asked to weigh in on the situation. As someone who experienced something similar when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were fighting for the title, Wolff (worth $1.6B as per "Forbes") said that this is where a team tends to find itself in a difficult situation. As quoted by "PlanetF1", he said,

“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," he said.

“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 added.

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Toto Wolff backs McLaren's Andrea Stella to make the right call

The Mercedes boss backed McLaren team principal Andrea Stella to make the right call. Stella had been a part of the Ferrari dream team back in the day and knew well how No.1 and No.2 driver dynamics were important in securing the title.

Wolff backed Andrea Stella to make the right calls for the team and said,

“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. 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?"

With 8 races left, McLaren's Lando Norris is now 62 points behind Max Verstappen. Oscar Piastri, on the other hand, is 44 points behind his teammate in what is slowly turning out to be a tightly contested championship this season.