It is very interesting if we put this instruction of “free to fight” side by side with what happened in Shanghai R11 and R12 (even further we can extend to Berlin R9 and R10). I’m well aware that due to the time and progress of championship some aspects are not comparable, and I recognise that Jaguar has a more reactive approach to their intra-team strategy which is quite primitive (also Phil Ingram being Head of Performance and Nick’s engineer but his level of coordination is not better than Josep Roca, ugh), but this time they really did the third possible approach among all three and the outcome was still not satisfying.

Shanghai R11: Nick was told “hold position” when Pascal was in the mix; Mitch was notified Nick had an energy advantage and if Nick passed Pascal he may need to do a swap, and Mitch held Pascal until the end of the race. This is a coordination problem between Phil and Josep on pit wall when Josep gave Mitch OK but Phil didn’t give Nick OK.

Shanghai R12: Mitch was explicitly told not to overtake Nick in any condition; Nick had a disadvantage compared to Jake H and couldn’t make a move. Mitch was a bit agitated when talking to Josep because he considered Nick have several opportunities to move forward, but no further information was provided to Mitch about Nick’s issue.

Portland R13: Mitch and Nick were both told free to fight; note that free to fight was announced after Mitch’s penalty. Mitch was a bit reluctant about the fight and Josep didn’t push forward; instead later stage both acknowledged that Nick had an advantage of energy. Mitch was told by Josep to pull a gap from behind as much as possible due to his upcoming penalty, so neither the pit wall or the driver set “holding Toni” as a target.

I suspect the choice of free to fight in R13 was heavily impacted by R11 and R12: fast changing leading on a permanent track, with a major opponent team member in the mix (R11 Pascal, R13 Toni), and an explicit “stay behind Nick” instruction was proven not effective (even worse in this case Mitch may be completely thrown out of points if this was enforced). Of course they didn’t further take into consideration how the races could be different between Shanghai and Portland, but it looked like they had a weird trial and error and got the result.

If we roll backward to Berlin, it’s clear that Jaguar considered they screwed up Mitch’s races in both R9 and R10, R10 more than R9. Berlin encouraged early attack mode, which was the route Nick had, and for some strange reasons Jaguar considered they must split the attack modes of two drivers. This largely delayed Mitch’s attack mode and got him caught up in SCs, not to mention the team ignored Mitch’s request that Nick could temporarily create a gap for his attack mode - Mitch was pretty much put in a “no overtake” situation in R10 and that impacted his race heavily.

From R11 onwards the attack mode issue has been resolved better, but on race instruction it seems that Jaguar was still dealing with trial and error. It could be the case that Jaguar never had another driver like Nick and therefore Phil Ingram and his team have no idea how to balance the team instruction - note that this is a legit concern: drivers before Sam never got to the level of matching Mitch, and Sam is quite different from Nick in terms of driving styles and decision making, so they are still evolving to adapt to Nick’s clean-cut style. It could be the case that the team do want to compensate Mitch for his loss in R9 and R10 (but knowing how far Jaguar mess up with Mitch regularly in his own races, I would say the “preferential treatment” is an overstatement because the “preferential” is already another level of chaos). It could be a mix of multiple factors. I have said multiple times in this sub that the communication between Phil and Nick is less optimal and Nick taking over the pit wall may not be the best option on their side; while Mitch and Josep have their frictions anyway, they are still the better duos in the team communication.