We’re all used to thinking of the Formula 1 World Championship as a battle for the Constructors’ title and, above all, as a direct confrontation between the drivers. However, there’s a comparison that no one considers: the internal battle between race engineers.
Normally, attention is purely focused on the battle between drivers, because the action takes place on the track and most of the time it involves drivers from different teams. But this year, that’s not entirely the case.
With the Drivers’ Championship increasingly becoming a two-man race between the McLaren boys, we asked ourselves this question: is the title fight really just about Oscar and Lando, or could someone else play a role too? The idea came to us after what happened on Saturday during qualifying for the Spanish GP, when Oscar Piastri was clearly unhappy with the team’s decision to give Norris the chance to use his slipstream in Q3.
But the real question is this: was it simply a poorly thought-out choice by McLaren (as Stella himself admitted), or do these kinds of situations also involve conflicts between race engineers?
Why include race engineers in the conversation? Our answer: why not?
You might be wondering: why even ask this question? Our response: why not? Does the name Peter Bonnington ring a bell? He was the race engineer with whom Hamilton won six of his seven world titles at Mercedes. Or how about Luca Baldisseri, Schumacher’s race engineer at Ferrari from 2000 to 2004.
Andrea Stella, before becoming team principal at McLaren, was known as Fernando Alonso’s race engineer—from 2010, when the Spaniard joined Ferrari, until his departure from McLaren at the end of 2018. He gained recognition for far less, arguably. Then at some point, he chose to take on a much more significant role and might one day be remembered for even greater achievements.
Returning to the main topic of this article, the dream of every race engineer is to be the right-hand man of a world champion. So, it’s only natural, we believe, to think that the people in those roles at McLaren are backing their own drivers—ready to fight it out behind the scenes. In this case, Oscar Piastri may have an additional advantage. His engineer, Tom Stallard, unlike Norris’s engineer William Joseph, is a highly competitive person.
Just consider that Stallard competed in the 2008 Olympic Games, winning a silver medal in rowing for Great Britain. For people like that, the word “defeat” doesn’t exist in their vocabulary—and this could be an extra boost in the challenging path ahead for the Australian.
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