Toto Wolff says McLaren 'precedent' in Lando Norris vs Oscar Piastri title fight 'difficult to undo' after Italian GP controversy

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff suspects McLaren have "set a precedent that is very difficult to undo" after reversing the order of their title-chasing drivers following a slow pit stop for Lando Norris in the Italian Grand Prix.

McLaren's policy of remaining as even-handed as possible in Norris and Oscar Piastri's exclusive duel for this year's Drivers' Championship was put through arguably its biggest stress test yet in the closing seven laps of Sunday's Monza race.

While running second and third behind runaway leader Max Verstappen, a slow pit stop for second-placed Norris, who pitted the lap after Piastri, caused the Briton to drop behind the title-leading Australian through no fault of his own.

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The McLaren pit wall quickly intervened to ask Piastri to let Norris back through on track - a request which, after initially questioning whether a slow pit stop was cause for that, the title leader complied with.

Piastri agreed that the team's call had been "fair" when speaking afterwards, while Norris defended the team's approach to racing.

Asked for his own thoughts on the incident, Mercedes' Wolff - who had to manage a notoriously tense and increasingly acrimonious in-house rivalry at his team between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg when they were going head-to-head for world titles in 2014-2016 - admitted he was now intrigued to see how things developed over the season's final eight rounds.

"There's no right and there's no wrong," the Mercedes team principal said after Sunday's race.

"I'm curious to see how that ends out.

"You set a precedent that is very difficult to undo. What if the team does another mistake? Do you switch them around?

"But then equally, because of a team mistake, making a driver that is trying to catch up lose the points is not fair either.

"I think we are going to get our response of whether there was right today towards the end of the season, when it heats up."

'What is a team mistake?' - Wolff on need for 'clear' understanding

McLaren's team order to reverse positions meant that Norris, who had led Piastri comfortably all race up to his botched stop, trimmed his team-mate's championship lead to 31 points.

Had Piastri stayed in the place he inherited, then Norris would have left Monza 37 points adrift, a week after losing 18 points when a McLaren car failure cost him second to the Australian in Zandvoort.

Wolff added: "There's no clear-cut answer for today. The answer with managing it that way will come towards the end of the season, if it's going to get more fierce.

"If the team made a mistake, the team inverted positions, an absolutely fair decision.

"On the other side, what is a team mistake? What if next time around the car doesn't start up and you lose a position or whatever, or the suspension breaks? What do you do then in the next one?

"So you could have a cascade of events or precedents that can be very difficult to manage. But I can only speak of how we found ourselves in this situation back [in] all those years that we had to manage.

"And I think most important is to have a clear strategy. You either go like this or you go the other way around. Either let them race or try to balance it in the most possible fair way."

How Wolff would have managed Hamilton vs Rosberg differently now

Like McLaren, who can clinch the Constructors' Championship as early as the next race in Azerbaijan on September 21 when there would be seven races still to go, Mercedes' Hamilton vs Rosberg years played out in campaigns in which the team's title hopes were never in doubt from early in the season.

Wolff says having to decide on such rules of engagement is ultimately a "luxury problem" to have, although he admits he would have managed the particularly bitter 2016 title campaign differently, in hindsight.

"I think if I look at our situations, because I'm not in their shoes of McLaren, back in the day, we had a gap where a Constructors' Championship is guaranteed, and you just let them race but within the spirit, you race fair and square but don't touch," he said.

"If you touch, then we take control.

"That's what I would have done in 2016, rather than trying to overmanage with our racing intent."

However, he believes there is one key difference between the situation he faced then and the one experienced by McLaren counterparts Andrea Stella and Zak Brown today.

"We had two different animals in the car in Lewis and Nico," said Wolff. "They were two assassins, fierce combatants that took no prisoners, racing against each other.

"At times, it was very difficult to bench for the team. I don't see that at McLaren."

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