McLaren race winner demands F1 team orders change

zak brown, oscar piastri, lando norris, david coulthard, mclaren, 2024 — Photo: © IMAGO

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McLaren race winner demands team orders change

David Coulthard has some advice for his former team

Kerry Violet F1 News Editor

F1 editor and journalist covering motorsport since 2024.

Wednesday 7 January 2026 11:17

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McLaren F1 legend David Coulthard has criticised an element of the team's modern operations following their 2025 double championship victory.

Last season, the papaya F1 outfit secured both the constructors' championship and the drivers' title thanks to Oscar Piastri and F1's newest champion Lando Norris.

This marked the first time McLaren managed to do the double since 1998 when Mika Hakkinen took home the trophy and contributed greatly to victory in the constructors' standings with team-mate at the time, Coulthard.

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The now 54-year-old won 12 of his 13 grand prix victories at McLaren and there are many parallels between his time at the British F1 squad and the modern iteration of the team.

One such likeness is the controversy surrounding team orders, but one thing Coulthard feels has changed for the worse is the fact that McLaren allow their race engineers to give such an order directly.

Coulthard urges McLaren to rethink race engineer approach

When discussing driver management at McLaren, Coulthard initially praised McLaren's history of handling intra-team battles before revealing the one criticism he has of the team regarding their race engineers.

"That bond between the driver and the engineer for me has to be absolute," Coulthard explained in a recent appearance on the Red Flags podcast.

"I'd like 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...You're there shoulder to shoulder.

"So that relationship between driver and engineer has to be unbreakable, that bond. 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. It should not come from the race engineer.

"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.'"

Calling upon his own experience of being asked to make way for Hakkinen, Coulthard revealed that whenever McLaren wanted to request a team order, it was sporting director Dave Ryan who would deliver the instruction, not his race engineer.

F1 McLaren David Coulthard