Mercedes boss Toto Wolff believes that McLaren did the “right thing” to instruct Lando Norris to swap the lead with Oscar Piastri in Formula 1’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
Piastri claimed the lead at the start and was controlling the margin to his team-mate when McLaren decided to pit Norris two laps earlier and hand him track position.
The Australian emerged from the pits on Lap 48 two seconds behind Norris, who elected to ignore several requests from his race engineer to revert the running order.
However, Norris would relent and cede the race lead with two laps remaining to allow Piastri to take his maiden F1 win and head McLaren’s first 1-2 result since 2021.
But while Norris critiqued the pit wall putting him in such a position, Wolff thinks McLaren’s cautiousness derived from the side’s recent inexperience at the sharp end.
He drew comparisons to a situation Mercedes experienced in Budapest in 2017 when Lewis Hamilton gave up a podium to Valtteri Bottas despite being in a title fight.
“You can only handle these situations if you actually come across them and are exposed to them,” Wolff said.
“This is the first time that this has happened to them,” Wolff recalls, adding that Mercedes got used to managing such circumstances through several “experiences”.
“In Hungary we had the same situation with Lewis and Valtteri – almost the same.
“We asked to turn the cars around and promised Valtteri that we would turn back if Lewis couldn’t overtake Kimi [Raikkonen]. And that’s what we did.”
However, Ferrari Team Principal Frederic Vasseur has suggested that McLaren created a bigger issue with the vigilant decision to protect Norris against an undercut.
“First of all, in their place I would have enjoyed the 1-2, but theirs is a big problem to have,” Vasseur added.
“I understand that in the race there was Norris’ undercut on Piastri, a choice made by the team to protect Lando from the comeback of his rivals, but he was still harsh on Oscar.
“Then they made a decision that I can understand. Piastri was leading from the start and the team’s decision was to invert the positions.”
Meanwhile, Red Bull chiee Christian Horner concurred with his Ferrari counterpart that the Woking-based squad could have prevented the saga that clouded its result.
“They didn’t need to make life that complicated for themselves,” Horner assessed.
“They were in a pretty comfortable situation, they chose to pit Lando two laps earlier, which usual practice is to pit the lead car first.
“And then they gave themselves a lot of work to do to reset that at the back end of the race.
“So yeah, that’s obviously their business but they perhaps didn’t need to create that problem.”
