The McLaren radio messages in Belgium are not what you think they were
I've seen a bit of commentary here on Tumblr and even among some motorsport press and influencers who ought to know better that either misunderstand or misinterpret the pair of messages that Oscar and Lando received from their engineers in the pair of times they were near each other on track.
As usual, partisans will point to them and see favoritism in one direction or the other. If Lando fans can look at a situation and see favoritism for Oscar and Oscar fans can look at the same situation and see favoritism for Lando, that ought to be the first clue that no favoritism exists. But despite that, when you're watching a race on TV without broader context, things are not always what they seem.
The tl;dr of the situation is twofold: Oscar did not ignore his race engineer when he was told to not fight Lando passing him, and Lando being told not to yo-yo race with Oscar was not strictly meant to keep him behind Oscar. The reason why is the reason for a lot of things this season: the battery.
Full explanation behind the cut (because this is long).
When Lando had caught up behind Oscar around lap 13, and they were running P5 and P6, Oscar was told on the radio not to make it hard on Lando to pass. This was a reasonable ask: Oscar had damage, and Lando had more pace. Oscar's pace was still quite good, however, and from a strategic standpoint, a straight battle for P5 would have slowed them both down for no net points benefit to the team and been a risk for one or both of them to lose position.
But Oscar re-passed Lando almost immediately. Is that proof that he ignored the request? No. And the message given to Lando the next time they were near each other on track is likely the best evidence for that.
What ended up happening with Oscar passing Lando looked very much like what drivers and commentators have come to refer to as "yo-yo racing," which is a phenomenon of rapid passes and re-passes within a short period of time. What looks rather entertaining on TV can actually be really annoying from a driver's perspective and even from a strategy perspective because of what causes it: battery deployment.
Throughout the season, several drivers have mentioned that their batteries have deployed unexpectedly to give them overtaking speed when they didn't want it. Alternately, a driver who has made an overtake intentionally may have depleted their battery prematurely, causing them to briefly slow and be passed by the other car due to the temporary speed differential. There are a handful of other scenarios involving battery deployment that can also have this result and can have lasting repercussions to the way that the software that controls harvesting and deployment around the circuit will behave on subsequent laps.
So when Lando and Oscar are close on track again later in the race, and Lando receives the message not to engage in yo-yo racing with Oscar, Will said that he would explain later. This tells me that the team had learned something about the previous engagement between them, and Lando likely would have understood the general outlines of this from what his race engineer said.
If I had to make an educated guess, the first exchange between them, which had been initiated on pure racing terms that would make sense under most circumstances, had disrupted the battery deployment learning in the car and may have cost one or both of them as much or more pace in aggregate than if they had properly fought wheel to wheel. (I haven't actually analyzed the data deeply enough to determine if this is actually the case because I'm traveling and don't have time to dig into it in depth, but some past data I have seen in similar situations suggest that this is a plausible hypothesis.)
There are a few other things that the team or Lando's side of the garage might have spotted to make this a reasonable ask, but they all would still go back to something to do with battery deployment, which is something Lando would have understood. The order from the garage wasn't specifically "don't pass Oscar" but rather "don't pass Oscar in a way that's going to screw up either of your battery deployments."
I've also seen some people suggesting that this had to do with making sure they could pit Oscar first, but given the wildly different strategies they were on, I don't think this was the case. Lando's tire strategy was aggressive but also perhaps too reactionary, while Oscar's was more traditional. McLaren have a habit of being too clever by half on their strategy, and it nearly always bites them in the ass. Lando was always going to pit second under this strategy, and if the late VSC or safety car had come along like the team had been counting on, they'd have looked like heroes, and Lando would have stood on the podium. But like with the miscue with the inters in Canada, they based their strategy on a gamble rather than a sure thing. Then things further went south when a technical issue was encountered on the pit stop he eventually had to take at an already non-ideal time.
But again, this isn't favoritism, it's a fumble by a team that has overreacted to or overcorrected for a grid drop in a way that once again suggests that McLaren may be so afraid of losing that they've forgotten how to win. (Qatar 2025 is another good example of this.) The team admits now that double stacking under the VSC where Oscar pitted would have been the better call, as even a too-long stint on mediums would have placed Lando further up in the field.
If you want an example of how another split strategy took a similar risk, and it paid off, however, take a look at Lando's one-stop strategy in Hungary last year. A lot of people howled about how putting Lando on this strategy somehow favored him over Oscar when in reality it was a gamble on something that could have easily backfired on a circuit that typically demands two stops. If the strategy in Belgium this past weekend had paid off and earned Lando a podium, I can practically guarantee people would be demanding to know why Oscar had not been placed on a more aggressive strategy as well.
Bottom line: McLaren does not intentionally advantage one of its drivers over the other. Unintentionally? Sure. But that's racing. If you're looking for shady and nefarious intra-team behavior, please check Mercedes. They seem to have something hinky going on over there.
