McLaren’s divisive ‘papaya rules’ to change? – The McLaren team’s comeback has been a remarkable Formula One tale. Having ditched Ron Dennis, the legendary team owner and principal in 2017 McLaren’s fortunes have been on the rise.

Dennis was obsessed with being a works based team with an engine supplier solely dedicated to the McLaren cause. And with long term partner Mercedes deciding to adventure once again into owing a team in 2010, this left McLaren on the back foot.

To be fair to Dennis when the new V6 hybrid era began in 2014, the power unit manufacturers who owned teams were allowed preferential treatment under the FIA’s rules. This meant their team would get any PU upgrades first, with customers having to wait until the factory could build enough.

 

 

 

Papaya rules dominate 2025 headlines

All this has now changed since Mercedes’ dominant era and F1 customer teams now must be given the same specification of powertrains that the manufacturers run in their own car. But for McLaren, Dennis’ adventure with Honda was a disaster and saw the team finish a lowly 9th in the constructors’ championship in 2017.

Zak Brown was subsequently appointed CEO of McLaren Racing and their fortunes have been on the up ever since. They are the first ‘customer team’ to win the constructors’ title since Brawn GP in 2009 and for two seasons now have dominated their PU supplier Mercedes.

Yet despite their second team title and Lando Norris maiden F1 championship, McLaren are a team under scrutiny. Much of which comes from their decision to make public their rules of combat between the drivers. ‘Papaya rules’ often dominated the headlines in 2025, with Oscar Piastri finally admitting the team orders in Monza affected his mentality and ultimately his title chance.

The papaya rules are McLaren’s rule book for their drivers which state the team comes ahead of any individual glory, emphasising no contact should be made and the drivers must respect whatever the team’s decision over their track positions.

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The Monza controversy

However, at times the rule book has clearly failed to account for certain situations. At the 2025 Italian Grand Prix Lando Norris was ahead of his team mate on track, therefore it was he who had priority over when the pitstops were taken. Yet his team mate Oscar Piastri was under threat from an undercut from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.

The team asked Norris if he was OK with them pitting Piastri first to avoid losing track position for his team mate and Norris agreed to allow it. When Norris came in for his tyre change a lap later there was a failure with one of the wheel guns meaning he was stationary for around 5 seconds.

Returning to the track Norris was behind Piastri and the team ordered the Aussie to cede the position to his team mate. Piastri grumbled over team radio that they had discussed the issue of slow pit stops claiming they were just part of racing.

Of course in the grand scheme of things it would have been Piastri who had suffered the wheel gun failure had Norris insisted on his right to the first pit stop. So the decision was fair but it caused a media storm with the suggestion McLaren were favouring Norris.

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Race engineers compromised

Ex-McLaren F1 racer David Coulthard has now observed the way McLaren operate their team orders is flawed given it is the race engineer who issues the instructions to the drivers. He argues that requesting the race engineers Will Jospeh and Tom Stallard to relay such team decisions undermines one of the most fundamental relationships in Formula One.

“The only criticism I would have is that I don’t like when the engineer [conveys the orders] – because that bond between the driver and the engineer, for me, has to be absolute,” said Coulthard on the Red Flags Podcast. “I would liken it to: If you guys are in the trenches together and someone blows the whistle back in the day to go out and fight the enemy, you’ve got to know that you’re both going at the same time.”

The Channel 4 presenter believes “that relationship between driver and engineer has to be unbreakable, that bond.” The solution in Coulthard’s view is to remove the engineers from the process when team orders are to be relayed.

“So I think that when they do give ‘move over, don’t race’ type instructions, that should come from the team principal or the sporting director,” he says. “It should not come from the race engineer.

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New sporting director role

“The driver should absolutely believe that his engineer would say: ‘That’s not my job, my job is to get my driver winning, and I will only give instructions that can help that. But I’m a professional and therefore if there’s an instruction which is going to get my driver to hold position, that has to come from someone else in the team’.”

During the poisonous era for Mercedes when both their drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were at all out war, it was often the team’s head of strategy – James Vowels – whose voice would be heard over the radio when controversial team orders or strategy decisions needed to be relayed.

Now McLaren have the opportunity to make a change to the way the papaya rules are communicated this season, with Will Courtney set to debut in Australia following his recent move from Red Bull Racing.

Courtney was Red Bull’s head of strategy for a number of years and will take up the role as McLaren’s new sporting director. This is an opportunity for the team to review its internal processes of communication during a race weekend and an opportunity to re-establish the race engineer as McLaren’s drivers confident, and most trusted friend.

 

 

 

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