McLaren dodges pitfall to tighten grip on F1 title

With McLaren’s advantage very apparent into the nitty-gritty mid-part of the season, there was hope among rivals that the new technical directive regarding front wing flex (which took effect from the Spanish Grand Prix onwards) might re-set the bar. It did no such thing in Barcelona, but with the quite distinct challenges of Montreal and the Red Bull Ring coming up it was going to be interesting to monitor the competitive patterns.

In Spain, McLaren locked out the front row, Oscar Piastri from Lando Norris, with the former’s pole time around 0.3sec faster than Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and George Russell’s Mercedes on row 2.

That was the foundation for a dominant Piastri victory, his fifth of the season and extending his lead in the world championship. As Piastri calmly converted pole into an uncontested lead, Verstappen was able to take advantage of some excess Norris wheelspin off the start to vault up to second. But around Barcelona’s long corners the Red Bull did not have the same control of rear tyre temperatures as the McLaren and so Verstappen was in no position to do anything about Piastri. What he was inadvertently doing was shielding Piastri from the other McLaren. By the time Norris took advantage of the Red Bull’s fading traction to make a pass on lap 13, Piastri was 4sec clear and in control.

As soon as Verstappen was overtaken, Red Bull switched him to a three-stop, pitting him on the very next lap. The greater tyre deg of the Red Bull made this the only feasible way to compete with the two-stopping McLarens, and the team was further encouraged in this by how far back the chasing Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton had fallen.

“The McLarens comfortably had the pace to edge steadily away”

Verstappen charged hard on his second set of soft tyres, so hard in fact that McLaren began to be concerned he might be able to gain track position and then make up the 20sec needed for the extra stop. They radioed their drivers to up the pace. Both Piastri and Norris responded that they weren’t sure they could get the required stint lengths from the tyres if they went much faster. Eventually though, it was the Red Bull’s tyres which faded first – and McLaren could breathe easy again. Verstappen’s third stop came before the McLaren drivers had even made their second. As Piastri and Norris duly pitted, Norris emerged still just ahead of the Red Bull. The McLarens comfortably had the pace to then edge steadily away.

That was how it was all set to finish; with Verstappen a solid third a long way clear of Leclerc and Russell. The Ferrari pitwall had switched Leclerc ahead of Hamilton early in the race as the latter struggled with the balance of his car. He was then undercut by Russell.

But there was a final flourish to the race as Kimi Antonelli pulled his Mercedes off track at Turn 10 with a broken engine with 12 laps to go, bringing out the safety car. Almost everyone dived for the pits for fresh tyres on which to take the restart. Critically, this included Verstappen. But the three-stop strategy had meant the only set of fresh tyres he had left were of the difficult hard C1 compound. It was probably an error on Red Bull’s part not to have left him out there, where he would have taken the restart in the lead but vulnerable on older tyres. Instead, he took the restart still in third but now vulnerable on slow-to-warm hard tyres.

Piastri and Norris immediately pulled themselves out of his reach and as Verstappen attacked the corner onto the pitstraight, the Red Bull got wildly out of shape and he only just rescued it. Verstappen’s lost momentum allowed Leclerc to grind past on the right as they raced down the straight and as the Ferrari driver – only slightly ahead – began to ease left in an attempt at picking up Norris’s slipstream, Verstappen remained resolutely straight, refusing to give an easy passage. They banged wheels for a split second as Leclerc prevailed.

Their dicing had allowed Russell to slipstream them both and he dived to Verstappen’s inside deep into Turn 1, forcing the Red Bull driver to take to the escape road from where he rejoined ahead of the Mercedes once more. Having lost two positions in the space of a few seconds and not understanding why he had been fitted with the hard tyres which had caused him these difficulties, a furious Verstappen was demanding that Leclerc should be told to give third place back for having hit him in the passing manoeuvre. Instead, Verstappen’s engineer instructed him to give fourth place back to Russell so as to avoid any potential penalty. Verstappen’s emotions overtook him as he backed off for Russell into Turn 5 and then rammed him before pulling aside properly later in the lap. The 10sec penalty he was given for the contact with Russell, which the stewards deemed deliberate, dropped him from fifth across the line to an official 10th.

“Verstappen’s contact with Russell was deemed deliberate”

But if McLaren was taking satisfaction from its uninterrupted winning form in Barcelona, it recognised that the heavy braking and short corners of Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve did not play to its car’s strengths. Sure enough, the MCL39 was merely competitive there. Especially as McLaren – like Ferrari – chose to forego the medium C5 tyre in qualifying, even though it was probably quicker than the C6 soft. Mercedes and Red Bull had no such compunctions and Russell qualified on a resounding pole, his Mercedes 0.15sec faster than Verstappen’s Red Bull. Piastri could conjure only third-quickest time on his C6 soft-shod McLaren, just ahead of Antonelli’s Mercedes. Both Norris and Leclerc had suffered major moments on their Q3 laps, leaving them starting only seventh and eighth respectively. They opted therefore to start on the hard C4 tyre, hoping that it would be a one-stop race and that they’d have a pace advantage in the second stint. It did not work out that way.

Russell took off into the lead, Verstappen kept up as best he could, Antonelli put a great pass on Piastri for third on the opening lap. That quartet put distance on everyone else. Although Mercedes was convinced that its tyre usage here was good enough to have one-stopped, it played safe and simply covered Verstappen’s more aggressive two-stop, with Russell never under any threat and Antonelli twice almost getting by Verstappen at the stops.

The hotter pace the two-stop imposed at the front meant that even Norris and Leclerc converted to two stops despite their longer opening stints. They both got by the early stopping Hamilton and Fernando Alonso and were quite closely matched in fifth and sixth on their second stints. But when Ferrari fitted Leclerc with another set of hards at his second stop as McLaren fitted mediums to Norris, the Ferrari fell badly away.

On fresher medium tyres than Piastri, Norris began to close the gap to him in the final stint, as they both caught the Verstappen-Antonelli train. Piastri got a few bad breaks in traffic, enough to bring Norris into his DRS zone. With five laps to go, Norris surprised Piastri with a dive down the inside into the hairpin but Piastri was able to grind back ahead on the straight, helped by DRS from a car they were about to lap. Norris backed out of the contest into the chicane, but got a better exit out of it and, sitting tight in the sister McLaren’s slipstream attempted to squeeze through the gap between Piastri and the pitwall. As Piastri eased left to take up his line into the right-handed kink, so Norris hit Piastri’s left-rear with his right-front, destroying his suspension and rolling to a stop as Piastri continued unaffected. Norris immediately took full responsibility for the accident, one which left him 22 points behind the championship-leading Piastri.

As the race finished under the safety car, Russell’s immaculate victory had been overshadowed by the McLaren collision.

Norris hit back in the most resounding fashion in qualifying at the Red Bull Ring, a circuit perfectly configured in its long corners and tyre heat-inducing layout, for McLaren. But also for Norris himself. Enjoying the enhanced steering feel of the tweaked front suspension McLaren had developed for him and which had debuted in Montreal, he was in his element as he took pole by half a second. Piastri was always a couple of tenths adrift but that gap increased when he was denied his final Q3 lap because of yellow flags for a Pierre Gasly spin and he lined up only third.

Verstappen too was caught out by the yellows and was forced to abort a lap that would otherwise likely have put him on the second row. Instead he would be starting seventh, behind the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson. This all left a front row slot available and it was filled by Leclerc’s Ferrari but at half a second off the pace no one at Ferrari was getting too excited about it. Mercedes went from dominating Montreal to being the fourth-fastest car here, illustrating the powerful sway of track layout and its effect on tyre behaviour on different cars.

Piastri passed Leclerc for second around the outside of Turn 1 just after the lights went out – and was in the slipstream of team-mate Norris as they charged up to Turn 3. It was just the beginning of a thrilling flat-out dice between the two McLarens as they left the field far behind. It was a field which did not include Verstappen who was taken out at Turn 3 on the opening lap by an out-of-control Antonelli who had been caught out by Lawson and Gabriel Bortoleto’s Sauber braking earlier than he expected. As he swerved right to avoid hitting them, he locked the rear of the car up and skated into the side of Verstappen. Both cars were out. Antonelli held up his hands in apology and Verstappen was seemingly quite relaxed about it all. He’d spend the duration of the grand prix watching the Spa 24 Hours race!

“Max spent the duration of the GP watching the Spa 24 Hours”

Piastri continued to hassle Norris throughout the first stint, using the big DRS advantage given by this circuit’s layout to force Norris into using his battery reserves to defend. Norris would then be slow through the middle sector as he recharged the battery. On one occasion Piastri got past into Turn 3, but Norris was able to immediately retaliate into T4. Piastri’s attack was preventing Norris from being able to properly deploy his battery through the lap for the best lap time, so he was unable to escape the 1sec DRS gap. It was as he was on the verge of managing to do this when he ran wide at the final turn, bringing Piastri right back onto him. The latter tried to follow that up with a surprise late move into Turn 4 but he locked up in the attempt, flat-spotting his tyres.

Norris used this as the opportunity to pit, further punishing Piastri who stayed out a few laps longer, hoping to use the tyre age offset over Norris to his advantage in the second stint. It didn’t work out like that. The time loss he suffered in those four extra laps on old tyres was around 6sec – only half of which he was able to make up over the subsequent 29-lap second stint.

The final stint brought the race between them back alive as they scythed through the lapped traffic and Piastri began edging ever-closer. But he never quite got into DRS range again and the battle was essentially finally extinguished by an unsighted Franco Colapinto running Piastri onto the grass and losing him 1sec of vital time.

Leclerc finished a 20sec-distant third ahead of team-mate Hamilton, with George Russell in fifth over a minute behind the winning McLaren. One-stopping Lawson was sixth, having towed Alonso’s Aston around in his DRS for the whole distance, with the latter briefly passed for seventh near the end by his protégé Bortoleto. Although Alonso retook the place, Bortoleto scored his first points, finishing ahead of Sauber team-mate Nico Hülkenberg and the Haas of Esteban Ocon.

It would probably be fair to say that the by-now long-forgotten front wing flex technical directive had made zero impact upon McLaren’s competitive position.