“The way to win a championship is with the team. You’re going to need Oscar and you’re going to need the team”.
At some point during Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, or in the hours that followed, Lando Norris might well have reflected on those words. They had been spoken by race engineer Will Joseph while pleading with Norris to hand the lead and, ultimately, victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix back to teammate Oscar Piastri in the race before Formula One’s summer break.
It’s a quote that has not aged all that well for McLaren. On lap one of Sunday’s race at Monza, Norris had to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting Piastri as the Australian made a brilliant overtake at the Roggia chicane to snatch the lead. At the other end of the grand prix, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc just out of reach and nearing a popular victory at the team’s home race, McLaren then opted against asking Piastri to let Norris into second position for an extra three points in his pursuit of championship leader Max Verstappen.
Reflecting on what Joseph had told him in Budapest, Norris might have been forgiven for wondering just when that help from Piastri and the team would be forthcoming. Instead what Norris got was “Papaya rules” — the rules of engagement McLaren set out between its drivers for that first lap and the rest of the race, named after the manufacturer’s distinct colour of orange. Understanding precisely what those had been was still unclear when the paddock left Monza on Sunday night.
Some felt not clearly backing Norris had been an obvious blunder given the context of the championship fight and the fact that Red Bull’s season appears to be falling apart at the seams. It’s been a year of contrasts for McLaren: on the one hand, it has developed the MCL38 into the leading car on the grid and has won three races; on the other, it has squandered opportunities to win on a handful of other occasions. While McLaren still left Monza with both drivers on the podium, having gained on Red Bull in the constructors’ championship and on Verstappen in the drivers’, the approach to the race and the implementation of its rules of engagement appeared to lack conviction one way or the other.
How clear were the ‘Papaya rules’?
The first public mention of the phrase “Papaya rules” was during a media session on Saturday evening, when team boss Andrea Stella said that was the philosophy its drivers would follow. Both Stella and CEO Zak Brown said after the race that it was an instruction to race…
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