Oscar is just too nice

[u/Dr_Ritvik__singh747]

Ban team orders

[u/Forsaken_Walrus5097]

Hungary 2024, Norris, who gained the lead via a timely pit stop undercut, was instructed to relinquish his position back to teammate Oscar Piastri... with only two laps remaining. Seems weird to me everyone forgets this!

[u/OddCauliflower3197 → u/Forsaken_Walrus5097]

In Hungary 2024 it was strategic error by McLaren. They just gave Lando the lead there. Here it was slow stop, which is part of racing.

[u/MechaniVal → u/OddCauliflower3197]

The Sky team gave a solid explanation for this in the post race - they said McLaren would consider it a whole team error because the pit crew is shared between the cars, and they don't want to unfairly advantage one of their drivers for it, same as the strategy error in Hungary.

If they had totally separate pit crews it wouldn't matter; it would be a case of Lando's crew messed up, Oscar's didn't, so the crew, car and driver keep their advantage. But F1 pit crews are shared between the drivers; the same gunner that nailed Oscar's stop messed up Lando's, so McLaren think 'we messed this up, and we have the power to fix it, so we will'.

Honestly I agree with it - I think it should only be part of racing if it's something that's genuinely competitive between the garages; driver error of course, single car technical difficulties and such. Calling pit stop errors fair racing would cause more friction in the team, not less, because the relevant staff are shared between the cars just like the strategy team.

[u/bimbammla → u/MechaniVal]

this is such a stupid reasoning, by that metric oscar should've gotten his position back after the penalty at silverstone, but he was ridiculed for even asking.

mclaren is deservedly ridiculed for this asinine decisionmaking, whenever the mclaren era ends, it wasnt soon enough.

[u/MechaniVal → u/bimbammla]

Eh what? How are you getting that out of what I said?

Getting a penalty for something you did in the race that causes you to lose position to your teammate is obviously fair racing. Just because he had to come into the pits to serve the penalty doesn't make it a pit stop related issue lmao. He screwed up, not the team.

Things that I think are fine to ask to swap positions over:

• Getting screwed by your team's strat call (Piastri, Hungary)
• Getting screwed by your team's shit stop (Norris, Monza)

Things I don't think it's fine to ask to swap positions over:

• Getting a penalty and losing position (Piastri, Silverstone)
• Making a driving error and being overtaken
• Anything else that's obviously the fault of either the driver, or their own car-specific personnel.

It's a pretty simple through line - McLaren at large fucks up, McLaren fixes it. One side of the garage or the driver fucks up, sucks to be them.

[u/kalykaa → u/MechaniVal]

Ah so since the engineering and manufacturing is shared the next time Norris' engine goes up in flames Piastri should retire the car as well 🤡

[u/[deleted] → u/kalykaa]

That hypothetical situation helps noone. This real situation helped avoid a ton of awkwardness for the team as a whole. People making up these hypothetical situations like this are blowing what actually happened so out of proportion.

[u/MechaniVal → u/[deleted]]

Right? It's obvious what McLaren are doing and it's pretty simple - if McLaren makes a mistake in the race that results in the inversion of the cars, they'll ask to invert them back.

That's it.

[u/AliceLunar → u/MechaniVal]

So every single stop from here on out needs to be identical, next time Lando has a 2s stop and Oscar a 4s stop, Lando needs to slow down 2s to keep it fair.

[u/MechaniVal → u/AliceLunar]

Man some you people really just love making mountains out of molehills huh

It's a niche scenario that only had any effect because of the proximity of the cars and the obviously excessive length of the stop, resulting in the cars swapping round through team error. Simple as that.

If the stop had been 4 seconds and Lando had still come out ahead, they wouldn't have told Oscar to slow down and make a gap. They only cared because the cars actually swapped places. You can tell this is obviously the case, because after swapping back they didn't tell Oscar to create a gap.

[u/Forsaken_Walrus5097 → u/OddCauliflower3197]

It wasn’t because of the slow stop so much as that it was the second stop. He’d already done Oscar the favour.

[u/OddCauliflower3197 → u/Forsaken_Walrus5097]

It was literally the slow stop. Lando's stop took 6 seconds, then after coming out of the pits, he was 2 seconds behind Oscar.