Karun Chandhok says Oscar Piastri may now have the same ‘irrational’ McLaren fear as Fernando Alonso

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Karun Chandhok has defended McLaren over the team order they issued to Oscar Piastri at the Italian GP. The debate rages on two and a half months after the event.

Lando Norris, running second, waived his right to the first pit stop to allow Piastri to cover off Charles Leclerc behind. However, when Norris was delayed in the box, he dropped behind his teammate.

Despite Piastri arguing that slow pit stops are ‘part of racing’, McLaren ordered him to return the place. Some feel that this amounted to excessive interference.

But writing in his column for The Intercooler, Chandhok said it was ‘the right thing to do’, even if it may have had a lasting impact on Piastri.

Oscar Piastri may have ‘a seed of doubt’ over McLaren’s support

Piastri was unsettled by McLaren’s team orders, based on his recent comments on the ‘Beyond the Grid’ podcast. He hinted that it was a distraction before his nightmare Azerbaijan weekend, where he crashed out of both qualifying and the race.

Chandhok suspects that Piastri started to doubt whether McLaren were completely behind him. At no point has he publicly implied that he thinks the team are favouring Norris.

But racing drivers can be ‘irrational’. Chandhok points to the example of Fernando Alonso, who became ‘paranoid’ that McLaren preferred teammate Lewis Hamilton in 2007.

“From Monza onwards, Lando has been stronger and more consistent,” he writes. “The team-order swap after Lando’s pitstop was controversial for some, but in my book it was the right thing for McLaren to do.

“The team had asked Lando if it could give Oscar priority as he was coming under threat from behind. Lando agreed on the basis that he would not get ‘undercut’ by his teammate; when that happened, it was only fair to swap them back.

“Mind you, given he mentioned it on a podcast several weeks later, you do wonder if that planted a seed of doubt in Oscar’s head concerning the team’s support for him.

“Racing drivers can be irrational when it comes to such matters – think of Fernando Alonso’s paranoia around his own Renault team when chasing his first title back in 2005 or at McLaren in 2007.”

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Alonso came to believe that Hamilton, a British driver and a product of the team’s academy, was the desired title winner. Norris shares those characteristics.

In the end, neither McLaren won driver won the 2007 championship, with the infighting at Woking helping Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen mount a remarkable comeback.

But nearly 20 years on, Zak Brown says he’d sooner let Max Verstappen steal the title than throw his weight behind one of the two drivers.

Alonso says McLaren are ‘very different’ these days, alleging that Ron Dennis was racing ‘against’ him in the final rounds of 2007.

Piastri trails Norris by 24 points heading into this weekend’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.