McLaren will keep driver strategy options open after Hungary F1 split

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris have given their blessing for split strategies to continue at the team as they battle for the 2025 Formula 1 title, but both feel Hungary was something of an outlier.

Norris was running third during the Hungarian Grand Prix and took the plunge to switch to a one-stop strategy – which put him out ahead of the two-stopping Piastri and offered him the opportunity to take victory.

While many queried McLaren’s decision to split its drivers’ strategies, both drivers say that picking strategies will be up to either side of the garage rather than locking both drivers into doing the same thing.

During Mercedes’ title-contending years with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, both drivers were given near-identical strategies to maintain some semblance of harmony. This is something that neither of the McLaren drivers want.

“We’ve spoken about it since then,” Piastri said. “I think ultimately there are race situations where being the last car in the train, you’ve got a lot less to lose.

“That kind of aspect is always going to be there and I think it would be unfair to neutralise that just because of wanting to be on the same strategy.

“I think there was discussions about whether there was anything we could have done differently for myself, which were very productive discussions. So I think we’re still going to be free to pick alternative strategies if that’s what we want.

“But yes, there was definitely some discussions about how we can tackle that because it’s obviously a difficult thing to try and cover different strategies, especially when you’re in the position we are in the championship.

Norris concurred that the scenario had not changed, and that it would have been “daft” to follow everyone on the same strategy from a competitiveness point of view.

He added that ensuring the team was satisfied overall with any similar scenarios was the absolute priority.

“I think at the minute things have not really changed. I think Budapest was a bit of an outlier,” the Briton explained.

“My decision to go on to the one-stop was that you’d have to be pretty daft if I was to box after everyone else ahead of me had boxed, just to follow suit and do nothing different.

“You don’t need to even be smart to do something different. It was more to get ahead of George to give myself an opportunity to be ahead of him at that point. Not necessarily to try and win the race at that point.

“It was pretty amazing that it turned out that way and was a perfect result. I didn’t make that decision at the time thinking, ‘okay, this is my race and I can try and win it now’.

“Maybe it was not a perfectly harmonious race between us as a team because it didn’t fall exactly into the place of what we would normally go by.

“But at the same time, I think it was just an example of that’s what can happen in racing sometimes. I think we both want as drivers things not to be overly strict and we don’t want to just not be able to race because we’re also here as individuals to race and improve who can do a better job.

“There were discussions, there’s been reviews; all along the season, every race, we make tweaks to things and we have a good understanding as a team.

“There’s no major changes, but we still have a constructors to win and that’s priority at this point.”