How McLaren’s split strategies helped Norris upset Piastri

BUDAPEST, Hungary — As McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown left his team’s motorhome on Sunday evening, he passed a large assembly of journalists waiting for a debrief with team principal Andrea Stella. Just an hour or so earlier, a battle for victory between McLaren’s two drivers — Lando Norris and Oscar Plastri — had come within centimeters of a collision on the penultimate lap of the Hungarian Grand Prixsetting pulses racing both on the pit wall and in the grandstands.

“In case anyone didn’t notice,” Brown told the journalists, “… that was a good race!”

As has been the case throughout Brown and Stella’s partnership at the top of McLaren, Brown provided the headline and it fell to Stella to give a more nuanced analysis of Norris’ victory over Piastri. Even so, the message was the same: McLaren has always promised to allow its drivers to race, and in Budapest they did just that.

In a battle as tight as Sunday’s, hindsight will always provide the loser with a route to victory. On Sunday, Norris’ fifth win of the season hinged on an unfancied one-stop strategy emerging as the fastest way to the flag, while Piastri was seemingly disadvantaged despite taking a two-stop strategy that had been earmarked as the preferred route to victory ahead of the race.

“You know, whenever you lose a race by such a little amount, it’s obviously a bit painful, but I mean, I’m sure it was entertaining from the outside,” Piastri said. “It was entertaining from the inside as well — a pretty fun race, all things considered — but obviously, when you’re on the losing side of that battle, it’s a little bit difficult.”

For Norris, the emotions had travelled in the opposite direction. After a poor start, his chances of victory looked close to nil, and it was only as his alternative strategy played out that the belief started to grow.

“I didn’t really think it was going to work for the majority of that second stint,” Norris said. “But with every lap, I kind of gained more confidence that it was going to be closer and closer. So, yeah, definitely a rewarding one.”

Was it fair to split strategies?

The battle between the McLaren drivers had an added complication from the start due to the presence of Charles Leclerc on pole position. The Ferrari driver held the lead into the first corner and initially had the pace to keep Piastri at bay while Norris dropped to fifth on lap one before recovering to fourth place by lap three.

McLaren had discussed the possibility of a one-stop before the race, but very much favored a two-stop as the better strategy. What’s more, by initiating the pit stops on lap 18 and committing to a two-stop with Piastri, there was a chance the fresh tires fitted to the Australian’s car would offer a performance advantage to undercut Leclerc and take the lead.

“Our baseline strategy today was a two-stop strategy,” Stella explained on Sunday evening. “We didn’t think necessarily that the one-stop was possible, so with Oscar we tried to go on a good, deterministic two-stop strategy, trying to pass Leclerc in the first stop. Then we tried to extend [the length of the second stint] with the second stop to have a tire [performance] delta in order to have those few tenths of a second to be able to pass Leclerc and this did work.

“When it comes to Lando and the one-stop strategy, when we extended, leaving Lando out, we didn’t think that the one-stop would have been possible still. But credit to Lando, he managed to put together some very strong sectors and lap times with tires that were relatively used. So we somehow convinced ourselves that the one-stop was starting to get in the game as we progressed with the first stint. It wasn’t like entering the race with a one- or a two-stop and we would have picked being them as equivalents, we thought that the two-stop would be the dominant strategy today.”

Piastri said he was offered a one-stop strategy in the first stint, but given his battle with Leclerc, who had looked strong in the first stint before his race pace deteriorated with a car issue, doubted it would help his situation.

“We did speak about it a bit before the race, so it wasn’t completely off the table,” Piastri said of a one-stop. “In the race I got asked about it, but very difficult to know from the cockpit what is going to be the best thing to do. When you’re the car behind [like Norris]your risk-reward ratio is always much different. So, yeah, there’s always that.

“Could we have matched Lando? That’s, I guess, the question that I don’t have the answer to. So, I guess that’s the only thing. But we wanted to try and win the race as well, and the best way of trying to beat Lando is by trying to win the race as well. That was obviously an intention, but I think we’ll definitely analyze if there was something we could have done a bit differently.”

The key benefit of the one-stop strategy, which perhaps wasn’t considered fully pre-race, was the free air it presented to Norris. While Piastri was bottled up behind Leclerc for the first two stints, Norris was able to run alone for the vast majority of his race and exploit the true performance advantage McLaren held at the Hungaroring.

“Lando found himself on a deviating strategy and he had more clean air, more laps in which he could use the full potential of the car,” Stella said. “Oscar spent quite some time behind Leclerc and this might have cost him a bit of time, but I think both executed their race at the highest standards.”

When the one-stop strategy was first offered to Norris, it meant staying out longer than he had initially planned on his first set of tires. At that point he didn’t view the strategy in itself as a path to victory, but instead a way to unlock other potential benefits if a safety car or virtual safety car allowed him to make a more time-efficient pit stop.

“When Will [Joseph, Norris’ engineer] asked me, ‘What do you think of the one-stop?’ I think at that point, I was already, like, seven seconds behind Oscar and eight or nine behind Charles. It’s not that I thought my race was over, but it was pretty slim that I was going to be able to at least fight from there, even on a perfect two-stop strategy. So, my expectations were not high, but I was more banking on a safety car or a [virtual safety car] or something to bring me back into the race — but I didn’t have any of that.

“In the end, I guess it didn’t matter. Will said, ‘What do we think of a one-stop?’ and I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ My confidence wasn’t the highest, but it was my best chance of trying to do something, and it turned out to be a little bit trickier because it actually allowed me to fight until the very end for the win. I’m still not sure it still felt like the best strategy, but I think with how difficult overtaking was, it turned out to be pretty good.”

Will McLaren remain harmonious?

The diverging strategies saw the two drivers pitched in a direct wheel-to-wheel battle in the final three laps of the race. Piastri’s second pit stop meant he had fallen behind Norris on track on lap 45, but his 14-lap-younger tires allowed him to close a gap of more than 10 seconds in the space of 20 laps.

With the use of DRS and a slipstream down the pit straight, Piastri saw half a chance present itself on lap 69 of 70 and attempted to seize the moment.

“I think I needed to be at least a couple of tenths closer, which was going to take a mistake from Lando to achieve that,” Piastri said. “I feel like that was going to be my best chance. You never want to try and save it for the next lap and then it never comes. So, I thought I would at least try and, yeah, not quite.”

Piastri locked a front tire but just missed the rear of Norris’ car. Three races earlier in Austria, Piastri received a warning from the pit wall for a similar incident, but Stella took great pride in the way his two drivers approached what could have been crunch moment in Hungary.

play

Norris says Hungarian GP victory down to ‘taking a risk’

Lando Norris breaks down McLaren’s strategy behind his Hungarian Grand Prix win.

“You know, when you have two great drivers, like Lando and Oscar, who race for a victory in a Formula 1 grand prix and race for the drivers’ championship, it’s always going to be very close,” Stella said. “But that was firm racing, it was fair racing at the same time. It was definitely within our principles. We had a bit of a lockup with Oscar, but at the same time, Lando left some space because he knew that Oscar would have been at the limit of braking.

“We keep being very proud of how Lando and Oscar go racing. I think this is a great way of honoring Formula 1 racing. These are the values of McLaren.”

The question is whether those values can be maintained until the end of the season. With 10 races remaining, the most potent punches are, perhaps, still being pulled when the two drivers race wheel-to-wheel.

Should a race like Budapest be the title decider later in the year, lap 69 might not be so cleanly fought and the diverging strategies carry far more controversy. But Stella, like Brown, is clear: McLaren is committed to letting its drivers race.

“Well, we are McLaren Racing — we bring the value of racing into Formula 1,” Stella said. “We want to provide great racing for Formula 1, we want to give our two drivers the possibility to utilize and express their talent, pursue their aspirations, their personal success and business to happen within the boundaries of the team interest and the fairness, the sportsmanship and the respect for one another. And for me, this is what I see.

“When we have a deviating strategy, when we have different options, I think this is part of racing. We want to make sure that none of the drivers is surprised and I think none of the drivers were surprised. So far, I can only be very grateful to the way Lando and Oscar have interpreted the way we go racing as a team, as a group which includes the drivers, and I’m sure this is going to be the same until the end of the season.”