As McLaren endeavours to allow each of its drivers an equal and fair shot at the sport’s biggest prize, so it’s coming up against the phenomenon of random events punishing the strategy of the guy who has the fight won. Some days the bear will eat you, some days you’ll eat the bear. It’s not really in your control which way around, just external circumstances.
Oscar Piastri can feel hard done-by over the last three races, in each of which he has been leading team-mate Lando Norris in the race’s early stages and looking very much in control, only to then have external circumstances offer Norris a lifeline. On two of those three occasions (Silverstone and Hungary) Norris was able to grab that line and use it to defeat his rival. But the greater merit was with the other guy. They were days when the bear ate Piastri. On the other occasion – at Spa – Piastri was able to slacken Norris’s lifeline and stay ahead.
There’s a skill in pouncing upon the opportunities provided, though. Those are the days when Norris got to eat the bear. But at Budapest he needed to roll off a great sequence of laps once he was in clear air while keeping his tyres in good enough shape to fend off an attacking Piastri on tyres that were 14 laps newer near the end. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk and you could sense from the radio conversation that his race engineer Will Joseph was a little concerned he might have been pushing a little too hard in that crucial mid-phase of the race once the two-stoppers had pitted out of his way to reveal the lovely clear air. But he’d got it spot on. Good enough to overturn Piastri’s greater intrinsic pace on the day.
George Russell – a distant third behind the McLarens – joined Oscar and Lando in the green room and upon seeing on screen how close Piastri had come to taking both McLarens out with a dive-bomb into T1 two laps from the end, jokingly commented to Piastri: “Why didn’t you T-bone him? That would’ve been great.”
Russell would have been very aware of how his friend Norris was feeling about a race which had come to him unexpectedly while trailing his team-mate for outright pace. For it had happened to Russell exactly like this at Spa last year. It was one of those occasions (rare in ’24) when Lewis Hamilton had a decisive edge in pace over Russell. It was one of those days, just like Hungary last Sunday, when everyone was certain that two-stopping was the fastest way. But when a ‘why not let’s try it, there’s nothing to lose’ decision to switch to a one-stop proved a winning call.
On that day a year ago, as the two-stopping Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and Piastri had pitted and left Russell – with no undercut pressure from behind as he was last of the fast cars – in an out-of-sequence lead, he got a feeling. “It was weird,” he reported. “Suddenly the tyres and the car felt so good. I got into this groove. Once I was in the lead, no backmarkers or other cars in front, it kind of felt like you were driving in the simulator. I was watching the gap to Lewis and the rate he was catching me and I just thought, ‘there’s no reason why we can’t stay out and try to make it work.’”
