McLaren respond to Nico Rosberg’s ‘strong recommendation’ after team orders saga

Nico Rosberg had some tips for McLaren after the race in Budapest.

McLaren boss Andrea Stella said the team would “make good use” of Nico Rosberg’s recommendation to be more strict when it comes to communicating team orders.

Lando Norris was told to give the place back to Oscar Piastri “at your convenience” but Rosberg, who himself was involved in a number of team order calls during his time at Mercedes, said that gives a driver far too much wiggle room.

McLaren take note of Nico Rosberg team orders recommendation

McLaren were becoming more and more desperate as the final laps ticked down with Norris appearing to ignore any request to hand the lead back to team-mate Piastri.

Rosberg believes that situation was made worse by the wording of the messages Norris received from his race engineer Will Joseph and the former Mercedes driver told team boss Stella that after the race.

“I will allow myself to make a statement first before a question,” he said on Sky F1. “I strongly recommend that you guys in managing this intra-team battle between the two drivers, you need to be extremely clear and firm.

“Today there was the word ‘your convenience Lando.’ That for a driver leaves the door very wide open to use all the kinds of grey areas so that would be my strong recommendation going forward.

“Very clear, strong instructions from the pit wall to the drivers, otherwise you end up with a whole bunch of difficulties between the drivers and I talk from experience.”

Stella, to his credit, took the recommendation well and suggested they “will make good use of it.”

The Italian was also questioned about the radio messages sent to Norris but he maintained he was confident the Briton would give the place back.

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“I think there was a little bit more than that single comment and message from Will,” he said. “There’s an entire approach to racing that we have with our team and drivers. We are on this trajectory together. None of us, the team, Lando, Oscar can go alone.

“That’s the message that we discussed on Sunday morning and with the drivers. You need to refresh this message. That’s why we have this meeting every Sunday and we are extremely pleased by our drivers, [they] are supporting the trajectory of McLaren, which is incredible.

“And for me, that’s the news today. We can talk a little bit more about Lando and Oscar but the message is that it’s a P1 and P2 in qualifying and P1 and P2 in the race and that’s incredible.”

Stella drilled down on Norris’ actions and rather than criticise him for making the team sweat, he instead said he would be more worried if he had given up the spot easily.

“I don’t know any race driver that when he’s leading a race will be happy to say ‘oh, yeah, of course, why we don’t swap back their position to the previous order?’” Stella suggested. “That’s not the nature of the drivers and I will be extremely worried, you will see me very concerned if Lando would say [that].

“So I think that’s why we needed to recall our principles. That’s why we recall the principles on Sunday morning and I think it’s true that the driver, if we want to be competitive in the Championship for Lando in particular, that is in the strongest position he will need. He will need the support of the team.”

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