Former Components 1 driver David Coulthard has pointed to a difficulty with how McLaren handles workforce orders throughout grands prix.
The Woking outfit’s papaya guidelines grew to become a preferred speaking level throughout 2025 as each drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, fought for the drivers’ championship. Norris and Piastri had been free to battle it out on observe with the one provision that they saved it clear, however there have been just a few cases the place the workforce enforced workforce orders.
Coulthard argued throughout an look on The Purple Flags Podcast that the workforce orders ought to have been issued by workforce principal Andrea Stella moderately than the motive force’s race engineer.
“The one criticism I’d have is that I don’t like when the engineer – as a result of that bond between the motive force and the engineer, for me, needs to be absolute. I’d liken it to: in case you guys are within the trenches collectively and somebody blows the whistle again within the day to exit and combat the enemy, you’ve obtained to know that you just’re each going on the identical time,” he defined.
“, [they’re] not hiding behind you, and also you’re not hiding; you’re there shoulder to shoulder. In order that relationship between driver and engineer needs to be unbreakable, that bond.
David Coulthard on the grid through the Dash
Picture by: Dom Gibbons / LAT Photographs by way of Getty Photographs
“So I believe that once they do give ‘transfer over, don’t race’ sort directions, that ought to come from the workforce principal or sporting director. It mustn’t come from the race engineer.
“The driving force ought to completely imagine that his engineer would say: ‘That’s not my job, my job is to get my driver successful, and I’ll solely give directions that may assist that. However I’m knowledgeable and subsequently if there’s an instruction which goes to get my driver to carry place, that has to come back from another person within the workforce’.”
Whereas the papaya guidelines got here underneath scrutiny in 2025, McLaren went on to win the constructors’ championship and drivers’ championship with Lando Norris.
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