McLaren made a very bad Monza weekend for Red Bull just a little bit better, according to a sarcastic Dr Helmut Marko.
Red Bull’s senior F1 consultant was asked on Sunday if championship leader Max Verstappen’s inability to progress beyond P6 on Sunday was surprisingly disappointing.
"Not at all," the 81-year-old Austrian replied. "We kind of saw this coming. We were one of the slowest on the straights. But it would not have been possible to drive with even less rear wing. We need balance in the car and need to look at where we took a wrong turn. We need to get back to where the car was still competitive.
"I want to congratulate Ferrari on the win and thank McLaren for their sporting principles," Marko winked. "You could see that in their drivers’ fight on the first lap, and in the fact that they did not swap the places closer to the finish.
"As a result, our poor performance was not so damaging," he told ORF. "It could have been worse, but the gap is instead about the same as it was in Zandvoort."
Indeed, Verstappen’s closest challenger for the 2024 drivers’ title, Lando Norris, narrowed the gap to 62 points on Sunday - but it better had Oscar Piastri not been forbidden to pass his McLaren teammate on lap 1.
Norris and Piastri’s race engineers repeated the phrase "papaya rules" to the drivers several times throughout the Italian GP, but Dutch personality Tom Coronel thinks Piastri ignored it.
"Piastri clearly still believes in the championship," he told Viaplay. "He thinks ’our car is better, we can beat Red Bull, so why should I help Norris?
"The team didn’t make a hard choice, and that just helped Max."
Russian commentator Alexey Popov thinks McLaren has some serious thinking to do. "After Baku-Singapore, there is a four-week break in which Red Bull can seriously improve the situation.
"The McLaren is a rocket now. It would seem obvious to try to get Norris as close as possible in the championship. I don’t know why they are squandering it."
Following a similar situation earlier in 2024, McLaren insisted it has two ’number 1’ drivers and it would be unfair to essentially demote Piastri.
"I mean, I would love it," Norris said on Sunday when asked if he’d like his McLaren bosses to throw all their support behind him. "But it’s not up to me.
"I wouldn’t say we’re running out of time, but time is going away slowly," he added. "When you’re fighting for a championship, you want every little thing."
On the other hand, some believe Norris does not deserve number 1 status.
"Piastri’s manager is Mark Webber, and he says simply that they will not be the second driver," former Red Bull driver Robert Doornbos told Ziggo Sport. "I just think Lando doesn’t deserve to be called the first driver."
Dutch GP boss Jan Lammers told NOS: "The only explanation I can think of is that Piastri has it in his contract that there will be no team orders.
"That is the only logical explanation, because otherwise I don’t understand it at all."
The Sun newspaper brutally claims that Norris "choked pole position again" on Sunday, with Doornbos adding: "You can see clearly that he makes mistakes under pressure."
McLaren team boss Andrea Stella admits it’s an awkward situation. "We have to analyse what happened," he said late on Sunday. "Maybe Lando simply braked earlier than Oscar.
"We have to make sure that our drivers stick to our rules."
Stella also admits that a team order may have come Piastri’s way on Sunday in different circumstances. "(Charles) Leclerc was simply always there. So we couldn’t even think about swapping places."
McLaren CEO Zak Brown explained that "papaya rules" is simply an instruction that the drivers must always consider the interests of the team.
"It was ok in turn 1," he said of Piastri’s attack on the sister McLaren. "Later in Lesmo it was an aggressive move, and we’ll look at the data again, but it was clean."
Former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher acknowledges the difficulty of the situation for the Woking based team.
"What can you say?" he told Sky Deutschland. "Oscar was fast. It was harsh of him to do that, but he would have just been breathing down Lando’s neck the whole race.
"The more important question to me is whether the two of them pushed each other so hard that they managed to ruin the one-stop. But as long as the pair are so close together, I would also have a hard time as team boss.
"You destroy a driver to some extent if you tell him that he has to back off," Schumacher added.
When asked about Piastri’s audacious attitude in his wheel-to-wheel with Norris, Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz summarised: "It shows that there are no friends in Formula 1 and that you cannot trust anyone."