Racing
© Liauzh
McLaren will no longer use the term “papaya rules” ahead of the 2026 Formula 1 season after the phrase became a flashpoint during its handling of the 2025 title fight between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
What began as internal guidance for how the two drivers could race each other turned into a public symbol of confusion over team orders and driver priority. The phrase entered wider view at the Italian Grand Prix when Norris’s race engineer Will Joseph told him he could attack Piastri within the “papaya rules,” and team principal Andrea Stella later explained that when the other car was McLaren’s own papaya-colored machine, drivers were expected to take “even extra care.”
McLaren’s intent was straightforward enough: allow Norris and Piastri to race, but without contact and with more caution than in a fight against another team. The problem was that the label came to represent something far messier once the championship pressure intensified.
The backlash centered on moments that made the framework look inconsistent. Piastri was ordered to hand Norris second place at Monza, and the pair then clashed in Singapore without an in-race penalty. Those episodes drove criticism that McLaren’s internal rules were not being applied clearly during a title battle in which every position mattered.
That debate grew well beyond the paddock. Questions over whether Piastri was being treated fairly by McLaren were reportedly raised in the Australian parliament, and by the end of the season he had fallen to third in the championship, 13 points behind Norris.
Piastri has indicated McLaren is reworking the approach rather than abandoning the idea of rules between teammates altogether. Speaking about the change, Oscar Piastri said the “papaya rules” will “look different,” adding: “We probably caused some headaches for ourselves that we didn’t need to at points last year.” McLaren CEO Zak Brown has also shifted to broader language about “the way we race.”
The change in wording reflects a wider view that the problem was as much about presentation and interpretation as the underlying principle. On the High Performance Racing podcast, former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley said: “That’s why you should never let the marketeers get in the way,” arguing that rules of engagement are normal in Formula 1 if everyone understands them. He said the real trouble starts when “50 per cent of the garage knows about the rules of engagement, and 50 per cent of the garage don’t.”
For McLaren, dropping the phrase is an attempt to strip away a label that came to define one of the team’s most contentious management calls and to avoid the same ambiguity if Norris and Piastri are fighting each other again in 2026.