BUDAPEST, Hungary – McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown left his team’s motorhome on Sunday evening, passing a crowd of journalists awaiting a report with team principal Andrea Stella. An hour earlier, the battle for victory between the two McLaren drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, was centimeters away from a collision on the penultimate lap of the Hungarian Grand Prix, raising heart rates both in the pit wall and in the stands.
“In case anyone didn’t notice,” Brown told reporters, “… that was a good race!”
Zak Brown
As has been the case during Brown and Stella’s association at the helm of McLaren, Brown provided the headline, and it was Stella’s task to offer a more nuanced analysis of Norris’ victory over Piastri. Even so, the message was the same: McLaren has always promised to let its drivers compete, and in Budapest they did just that.
In a battle as close as Sunday’s, hindsight will always provide the loser with a route to victory. On Sunday, Norris’s fifth victory of the season depended on a disfavored one-stop strategy emerging as the fastest way to the flag, while Piastri seemed to be at a disadvantage despite adopting a two-stop strategy that had been marked as the preferred route to victory before the race.
“You know, every time you lose a race by such a small margin, it’s obviously a bit painful, but I’m sure it was entertaining from the outside,” said Piastri. “It was also entertaining from the inside, 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 had traveled in the opposite direction. After a bad start, his chances of victory seemed close to zero, and it was only when his alternative strategy unfolded that belief began to grow.
“I didn’t really think it would work for most of that second stint,” Norris said. “But with every lap, I gained more confidence that I was going to be closer and closer. So, yeah, definitely rewarding.”
Lando Norris
Was the division of strategies fair?
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 led at the first corner and initially had the pace to keep Piastri at bay, while Norris fell to fifth place on the first lap before recovering to fourth place on lap 3.
McLaren had discussed the possibility of a pre-race pit stop, but favored a two-stop strategy. Furthermore, by initiating pit stops on lap 18 and committing to two stops with Piastri, there was a possibility that the new tires fitted to the Australian’s car would offer a performance advantage to undermine Leclerc and take the lead.
“Our base strategy today was a two-stop strategy,” 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 [performance] of tires to be able to have those few tenths of a second to be able to overtake Leclerc, and this worked.”
Andrea Stella
Piastri said he was offered a one-stop strategy in the first stint, but given his battle with Leclerc, who looked strong before his race pace deteriorated with a car issue, he doubted it would help his situation.Legend: 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 about a pit stop. “In the race they asked me about it, but it’s very difficult to know from the cockpit what’s best to do. When you’re the car behind [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 as well, and the best way to try to beat Lando is by trying to win the race as well. 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 stuck 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 that McLaren had at the Hungaroring.
“Lando found himself on a different strategy, and had more clean air, more laps in which he could use 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 to the highest standards.”
When the one-stop strategy was first offered to Norris, it meant staying out longer than he had initially planned with his first set of tires. At that moment, he didn’t see the strategy itself as a path to victory, but as a way to unlock other potential benefits if a safety car or a 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 could at least fight from there, even with a perfect two-stop strategy. So, my expectations weren’t high, but I was more confident in a safety car or a [virtual safety car] or something to 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 until the end for the victory. I’m still not sure it felt like the best strategy, but I think with how difficult it was to overtake, it turned out to be pretty good.”
Will harmony continue at McLaren?
Divergent strategies saw the two drivers engage 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 tires, 14 laps younger, 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 on the pit straight, Piastri saw a half-chance present itself 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,” Piastri said. “I feel like that was going to be my best opportunity. You never want to try and save it for the next lap and then it never comes. So, I thought I’d at least have a go, and yeah, not quite.”
Oscar PiastriPiastri locked a front tire but didn’t reach the rear of Norris’s 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.Legend: 1:26 Norris says the victory in the Hungarian GP is due to ‘taking a risk’ Lando Norris analyzes 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,” said Stella. “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 braking limit.
Andrea Stella
“We remain very proud of how Lando and Oscar race. 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 still being dealt when the two drivers are racing wheel to wheel.
If a race like the one in Budapest were to decide the title later in the year, lap 69 might not be so clean and divergent strategies would lead to much more controversy. But Stella, like Brown, is clear: McLaren is committed to letting their drivers race.
“Well, we are McLaren Racing, we bring the value of racing to Formula 1”, Stella said. “We want to offer great races for 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 so that it happens within the limits of the team’s interest and fairness, sportsmanship and mutual respect. And for me, this is what I see.
Andrea Stella
“When we have a split 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’m sure this is going to be the same until the end of the season.”
