From the moment he set foot on a Formula 1 grid, it was as clear as day that Oscar Piastri would become a Grand Prix winner at some stage in his career. That moment finally arrived on Sunday at the Hungaroring, but McLaren did its best to dampen the occasion with a messy handling of the final stint between the Australian and his British team-mate Lando Norris.
Piastri stole a march on Norris at lights out to take the lead into Turn 1 and from there on he controlled proceedings, with a brief slip-up at Turn 11 during the middle stint of the race his only blemish. Approaching the final stops, Piastri led a McLaren 1-2 and ordinarily one would imagine the leader would be given preferential treatment from the pit wall. However, McLaren, playing the cautious game despite boasting the strongest car on race day, pitted Norris first to cover Lewis Hamilton, forcing Piastri to run two extra laps and get undercut by his team-mate.
Piastri was told not to worry about it and Norris was instructed to wave his team-mate through after the final stops once it became convenient. However, a three-second gap had been created in Norris’ favour thanks to the stops and the Briton sought to extend it, all the while his engineer Will Joseph pleaded with him to give Piastri back the lead that he deserved. After plenty of badgering and bartering, Norris eventually succumbed to team orders to let Piastri by to take his maiden win with three laps remaining, after stretching the gap to six seconds at one stage.
It was all a rather unnecessary situation, dampening the mood of an emphatic finish and Piastri’s deserved maiden win. The threat from Hamilton was never genuine and as Norris stated on the radio and post-race, McLaren should have pitted Piastri first. Still, Norris played the team game and respected it post-race, although argued it shouldn’t have been required in the first place.
“I got put into the lead rather than wanting to,” he said. “I feel like we made things way too hard for ourselves and way too tricky for ourselves. We should have just boxed Oscar first and things would have been simple. They gave me the lead, and I gave it back. I shouldn’t have won today. I didn’t deserve to win, because of my start and Oscar’s good start, and that’s that. I don’t feel like, I know I was in that position for a while, and 16, 17 laps or whatever, it’s hard when you’re in that position to give it back, because you’re there. You’re there, and of course that went through my mind, seven points that I’m going to lose. But I think the real fact is that I almost shouldn’t have had them in the first place, I shouldn’t have had them in my hands. So the team were right, and I stand by what they said.”
Piastri relayed that he was never “really concerned” that Norris wouldn’t wave him through. “The only thing I was concerned about a bit was if there was a Safety Car, then it would have taken the situation out of our hands, would have taken the control out of our hands,” the Aussie said. “So, that was really the only thing I was a bit concerned about, but we’d spoken about it at the timing of the stop that we would sort it back out. And, yeah, I mean, I had full trust in everyone in the team, including Lando, that we would make that happen.”
The last thing either driver needed after the Hungarian Grand Prix was to be fielding questions like this. McLaren still strikes a team finding its feet back in F1’s winners’ circle, unable to make clear, calculated decisions. Rival Red Bull Team Principal Chrisitan Horner is well-versed in the game of winning grands prix and he said McLaren “didn’t need to make life that complicated for themselves. They were in a pretty comfortable situation, they chose to pit Lando two laps earlier, usual practice is to pit the lead car first, and then they gave themselves a lot of work to do to reset that at the back end of the race. So yeah, that’s obviously their business but they perhaps didn’t need to create that problem.”
So why did McLaren go to such complicated lengths to secure a Piastri-led 1-2 finish? Team Principal Andrea Stella explained…
“We knew that by going first with Lando that could have been the situation, but we wouldn’t have done it if we weren’t sure that this would be fixed,” he divulged. “I think today, because we are at the Hungaroring and because it was so hot, there were two variables that we really wanted to get right. The first one, we didn’t want to pit too early because the tyres were degrading a lot and we didn’t want to run out of tyres should Verstappen become a problem at the end of the race. And therefore, we just wanted to delay the pitstop as much as possible. And the second element is that you can have a problem at the pitstop, so you need to go safe from a pitstop point of view.
“Do you want to pit only when you have three seconds? Because then you know what happens that all the pressure goes on the pit crew. I don’t want in a race like today that the responsibility goes to the pit crew. I’d rather take the responsibility at the pit wall, secure the P1, P2 and then we manage the situation between the pit wall and the drivers because we talk about this situation and we know how we go about this situation. I did not want to have a situation at the pitstop where there’s a problem with a nut, there’s a problem with the execution that puts us behind a Mercedes or a Ferrari,” he reiterated. We have seen with Verstappen today what can happen and Verstappen would have had the tyres much fresher than the guys ahead. So I think we would be talking something else if that was the case like it happened to Verstappen.
“So I know that for the media, I know that for watching on TV this becomes a story, but for us internally, this becomes part of the way we go racing and that’s why we invest so much in culture, in values, and in the mindset because we want to be able to manage this situation if we want to be in the championship with Lando, with Oscar, and with McLaren.”
A convincing argument? Maybe. A well-thought-out response to the question on everyone’s mind? Perhaps. One thing is for certain, McLaren still needs to iron out the kinks.
