Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff has weighed in on McLaren duo Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s coming together at the 2025 Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix.
McLaren came into the Canadian GP weekend off the back of two consecutive wins in Monaco and Barcelona. However, the MCL39 struggled to showcase the same pace right from Friday practice onwards in Montreal.
A late-race charge on Sunday from both, Piastri and Norris seemed to bring the Woking-based team close to another win before disaster struck on the pit straight.
Norris was all over Piastri’s rear wing out of the final chicane after making a daring lunge down the inside of the Australian at turn 10, eager to catch up to the leading trio of Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Max Verstappen and George Russell.
However, the 25-year-old misjudged a closing gap on the inside of Piastri and tapped his front wing on the rear of his team-mate’s MCL39. The resultant contact shot Norris towards the inside wall, collecting his wing and ending his race.
Wolff has urged the Woking-based team to act quickly and draw the line to avoid such further instances.
“That’s the trick here. Establish how do you want to go about it,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
Having said that, Wolff believes that the brewing intra-team rivalry between Norris and Piastri wouldn’t be much of a headache for McLaren given their superiority this season and the extent of their lead in the Constructors’ Championship.
Yet he sympathised with the predicament both, Team Principal, Andrea Stella and CEO, Zak Brown are faced with.
“It obviously increases the complexity if the constructor championship is in your hands too because [the team] could always argue, ‘well, we need to win the constructor championship. We need to score these points.” he explained.
“But in that case, they are so far ahead that it’s not even a question whether they will win that. So, it’s certainly a tricky situation.”
Wolff believes ‘strong management’ will see McLaren through
The Austrian is perhaps the best person within the paddock to seek advice from about how to contain two teammates that are going head-to-head for a driver’s title.
Back in 2016, the rivalry between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg at Mercedes soured quickly and culminated with the infamous crash in Spain that saw both the drivers DNF on the first lap.
He joked he had “seen the movie” before while referring to Hamilton and Rosberg’s heated rivalry. “I was right in there as an actor,” he added.
For McLaren, though, Wolff doesn’t predict matters to go as far as they did with the Silver Arrows.
“The characters are very different than they were with us,” Wolff said. “And it’s about strong management to learn that. But we learned it by doing it and I’m sure that these guys will get on top of that,” concluded the 53-year-old.
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