McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, upon leaving his team’s motorhome, encountered a crowd of journalists eager to get statements from team principal Andrea Stella. Just an hour earlier, the fight for victory between McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri was on the verge of culminating in a crash on the penultimate lap of the Hungarian Grand Prix, raising the tension both in the pit wall and in the stands.
“In case anyone didn’t notice,” Brown commented to reporters, “… it was a great race!”
Zak Brown
Following the usual dynamic between Brown and Stella, Brown provided the headline, leaving Stella to the detailed analysis of Norris’ victory over Piastri. The message was clear: McLaren has always promised to allow its drivers to compete, and in Budapest they kept their word.
In a battle as close as Sunday’s, hindsight always offers the loser a route to victory. On this occasion, Norris’s fifth victory of the season depended on a one-stop strategy, which emerged as the fastest, while Piastri seemed to be disadvantaged despite opting for a two-stop strategy, initially considered the most advantageous.
“You know, when you lose a race by that little, it’s a bit painful, but I’m sure it was entertaining from the outside,” said Piastri. “It was entertaining from the inside as well, a pretty fun race, considering everything, but obviously, when you’re on the losing side of that battle, it’s a bit difficult.”
Oscar PiastriFor Norris, the emotions were different. After a bad start, his chances of victory seemed null, and it was as his alternative strategy developed that confidence began to grow.
“I didn’t really think it was going to work for most of the second stint,” Norris said. “But with each lap, I gained more confidence that I was going to be closer. So, yes, it’s definitely rewarding.”
Lando Norris
Was the division of strategies fair?
The battle between the McLaren drivers was complicated from the start by the presence of Charles Leclerc in pole position. The Ferrari driver led the race at the first corner and, initially, kept Piastri at bay, while Norris dropped to fifth place on the first lap, before recovering to fourth position on lap 3.
McLaren had discussed the possibility of a single stop before the race, but favored a two-stop strategy. Furthermore, by initiating pit stops on lap 18 and committing to two stops with Piastri, there was the possibility that the new tires on the Australian’s car would offer a performance advantage to overtake Leclerc and take the lead.
“Our base strategy today was a two-stop,” Stella explained on Sunday night. “We didn’t necessarily believe that the one-stop was possible, so with Oscar we tried to follow a good deterministic two-stop strategy, trying to overtake Leclerc at the first stop. Then we tried to extend [the duration of the second stint] with the second stop to have a delta [of performance] of tires to have those tenths of a second and be able to overtake Leclerc, and this worked.”
Andrea StellaPiastri commented that he was offered a one-stop strategy in the first stint, but given his difficulties with Leclerc, who had seemed strong before his race pace deteriorated due to a problem with the car, he doubted that would help his situation.Lando Norris beat his McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, by just 0.698 seconds in Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix.“We talked about it a bit before the race, so it wasn’t completely ruled out,” Piastri said of the one-stop strategy. “In the race they asked me, but it’s very difficult to know from the cockpit what’s best to do. When you’re the car at the back [like Norris], your risk-reward ratio is always very different. So, yeah, there’s always that.”
“Could we have matched Lando? That is, I suppose, the question I have no answer to. So, I guess that’s the only thing. But we wanted to try to win the race too, and the best way to try to beat Lando is to try to win the race too. That was obviously the intention, but I think we will definitely analyze if there was anything we could have done a little differently”.
The key benefit of the one-stop strategy, which perhaps wasn’t fully considered before the race, was the clean air it presented to Norris. While Piastri was blocked behind Leclerc for the first two stints, Norris was able to run alone for most of his race and exploit the true performance advantage that McLaren had at the Hungaroring.
“Lando encountered a deviated strategy, and had more clean air, more laps in which he could utilize the full potential of the car,” said Stella. “Oscar spent quite a bit of time behind Leclerc, and this might have cost him a bit of time, but I think both executed their race at the highest level.”
Andrea Stella
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 the time, he didn’t see the strategy itself as a path to victory, but rather as 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’s engineer] asked me, ‘What do you think of the one-stop strategy?’ 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 could at least fight from there, even with a perfect two-stop strategy. So, my expectations weren’t high, but I was betting more on a safety car or a [virtual safety car] or something that would bring me back into the race, but I didn’t get any of that.”
Lando Norris
“In the end, I guess it didn’t matter. Will said: ‘What do we think about a stop?’ and I said: ‘Let’s do it.’ My confidence wasn’t the highest, but it was my best chance to try to do something, and it turned out to be a bit more complicated because it actually allowed me to fight to the end for the victory. I’m still not sure if it was the best strategy, but I think with how difficult it was to overtake, it turned out to be quite good.”
Will McLaren remain harmonious?
Divergent strategies led the two drivers to a direct wheel-to-wheel battle in the last 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 fresher tires allowed him to reduce a gap of more than 10 seconds in the space of 20 laps.
With the use of DRS and a slipstream on the pit straight, Piastri saw a medium opportunity arise on lap 69 of 70 and tried to seize the moment.
“I think I needed to be at least a couple of tenths closer, which was going to require a mistake from Lando to achieve,” said Piastri. “I feel like that was going to be my best chance. You never want to try and save it for the next lap and it never comes. So, I thought I’d at least give it a go, and yeah, not quite.”
Oscar PiastriPiastri locked a front tire, but didn’t reach the rear of Norris’ car. Three races earlier, in Austria, Piastri received a warning from the pit wall for a similar incident, but Stella felt very proud of the way his two drivers approached what could have been a crucial moment in Hungary.1:26Norris says the victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix was due to ‘taking a risk’Lando Norris breaks down McLaren’s strategy behind his victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix.“You know, when you have two great drivers, like Lando and Oscar, who are competing for a win in a Grand Prix of [Formula 1] and competing for the drivers’ championship, it’s always going to be very close,” Stella said. “But that was a firm race, it was a fair race at the same time. It was definitely within our principles. We had a small lock-up with Oscar, but at the same time, Lando left some space because he knew Oscar would be at the limit of the braking.”
“We are still very proud of how Lando and Oscar compete. I think this is a great way to honor 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 powerful blows, perhaps, are yet to come when the two drivers compete wheel to wheel.
If a race like the one in Budapest were the deciding factor for the title at the end of the year, lap 69 might not be so clean and the divergent strategies would bring much more controversy. But Stella, like Brown, is clear: McLaren is committed to letting their drivers compete.
“Well, we are McLaren Racing: we bring the value of racing to Formula 1,” Stella said. “We want to offer great racing to Formula 1, we want to give our two drivers the possibility to use and express their talent, pursue their aspirations, their personal and business success within the limits of the team’s interests and fairness, sportsmanship and mutual respect. And for me, this is what I see.”
Andrea Stella
“When we have a diverging strategy, when we have different options, I think this is part of racing. We want to make sure that none of the drivers are surprised, and I think none of the drivers were surprised. So far, I can only be very grateful for the way Lando and Oscar have interpreted the way we race as a team, as a group, which includes the drivers, and I am sure this is going to be the same until the end of the season.”
