andrea stella on swapping his drivers during the united states grand prix: “We had seen during the weekend that Lando was a little bit faster than Oscar. This is a track in which Lando excels and is one of the tracks in which Oscar instead struggles a little bit more.” “So this year I think in particular for Oscar is tricky because Oscar’s superpower is to build, once he creates references he can really effectively build lap after lap.” “But here, every lap is different. So these are the conditions that challenge Oscar. And actually are the conditions where Lando uses his own superpower which is being very adaptive to the conditions especially as the car slides.” “So given this context we discussed before the race that if Lando was behind Oscar and Oscar could not keep up with the cars ahead then we could have given Lando a chance or an opportunity to see if we could attack the cars ahead, and that’s what we did.” “It’s a way of demonstrating that as a team and together with the drivers we care about the interest of the team which was always the conversation that we have had. And especially after Singapore, we reinforced how much it’s important that we all together help McLaren go back to the position that we want to have, which is Oscar and Lando first row in qualifying, [and] fighting for the win. And then we manage the internal competition.” “But up to then, all together we need to sustain the trajectory of McLaren back to the front.”

On oscar’s onboard the only thing said to him was the line about different strategies (a code perhaps to swap). Nothing else was said before or after (barring a comment about his brakes after going off at t12) and there was no pushback from him on the move now andrea is confirming the swap was discussed pre race. makes sense why they ended up on basically the same strategy after both being told they’re on different ones if it actually never had to do with strategy, mclaren have made their coding nonsense clear in the past I’m not gonna police anyone in how they reacted to this and in the moment it’s difficult to see things from a logical point of view when emotions are rampant, but so much discourse for a swap that was seemingly happening before the lights even went out I’ve also seen way too many people say lando asked for that swap, he was asked about his pace, he said he had more but put the ball back in McLarens court And after the reaction to the Singapore sprint, I can’t blame him for making it 100% McLarens liability