Verstappen says he would “certainly not” have obeyed orders McLaren gave Piastri · RaceFans

Oscar Piastri was wrong to obey McLaren’s team orders during last year’s championship fight, says Max Verstappen.

The Red Bull driver finished two points behind championship-winner Lando Norris last year.

Norris risked losing three points to Piastri in the Italian Grand Prix after a slow pit stop dropped him behind his team mate. However McLaren instructed Piastri to allow Norris to overtake him in order to restore the original running order.

The team had told its drivers beforehand that they would maintain the running order through the pit stops. They did this as they chose to pit their drivers in the reverse of their usual sequence in order to contain the threat from Charles Leclerc behind them.

Verstappen, who could have beaten Norris to the championship had Piastri not followed McLaren’s instruction, said he would not have obeyed the order.

“Certainly not,” he told Blick. “If you do that once without a clear reason, you sell your soul. The team can then do whatever it wants with you.

“And let’s not forget: Piastri was right in the middle of the title fight.”

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Piastri was the championship leader at that stage in the season. He arrived at Monza 24 points ahead of Norris and 104 ahead of Verstappen. The Red Bull driver slashed his deficit with a strong run over the second half of the season.

Verstappen said it was “correct” to assume he would have won the championship well before the final race had he been driving for McLaren last year. “But I never really interfere in my rivals’ internal issues,” he added. “I can always give them a fighting answer on track.”

The Red Bull driver won eight grands prix last year, the most of anyone, as Norris and Piastri took seven apiece. He also won two sprint races, the same as Norris.

However Verstappen remains unimpressed by F1’s sprint race format. “The six sprints do not give me any feelings of happiness,” he said.

F1 has held 24 sprint races over the last five seasons, of which Verstappen has won 13 – more than all his rivals put together. However he dismissed the format as uninteresting, said it disrupts the weekend and creates too much of a burden for the team’s staff.

“Most of these unnecessary Saturday appearances were boring as well,” he said. “But worse still, they disrupt the normal build-up for our real show on Sunday.

“And something most fans forget: this constant workload is particularly stressful for the mechanics. In most teams they are already working in two shifts.”

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