“Obviously not our best day,” said McLaren driver Lando Norris, an understatement on a day in which his team squandered a victory, although not for the Briton.
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Verstappen reduced Norris’ championship lead to 12 points heading into Abu Dhabi next weekend, with the Briton’s teammate Oscar Piastri a further four points behind.
Piastri was momentarily speechless after the race, as he digested the fact that a certain victory had turned into a second place behind Verstappen, and his second place in the championship had turned into third.
“It’s quite painful,” the Australian said.
Norris remains the favorite to win the title: the points margin means he only needs to finish third to win the championship in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, even if Verstappen wins the race.
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But if Qatar shows anything, it’s that anything can happen.
And it’s worth remembering the last time the final race featured so many drivers.
In 2010, Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso headed to Abu Dhabi with leads of eight and 15 points over Red Bull’s Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel.
Famously, in one of the most extraordinary title climaxes in F1 history, Ferrari botched its strategy and opened the door for Vettel to win his first title.
The key mistake
It was the second painful weekend in a row for McLaren, after Norris and Piastri lost second and fourth place with a double disqualification in Las Vegas.
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Ahead of the Qatar race weekend, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown had compared Verstappen to a horror movie villain who keeps coming back alive.
Ironically, McLaren had his own horror film in Lusail.
They handed Verstappen a victory that will only increase the pressure on his drivers in a final race weekend that is a delightful prospect for neutrals and agonizing for Norris and McLaren.
When the safety car came out on lap seven, following a crash between Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, the obvious call was to pit for a tire change. So obvious that every other team did it.
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The reason it was such a safe decision – for everyone but McLaren – was that tire supplier Pirelli had mandated a maximum of 25 laps for any set of tires due to the risk of failure on the Qatar track’s demanding corners and sharp curbs.
The safety car came out with exactly 50 laps remaining. So, there were two 25-lap stints left for anyone who stopped at that point.
Given that stopping under a safety car saves nine seconds of race time compared to a pit stop under green flag conditions, and that this would have been a one-stop race if not for Pirelli’s prescriptions, a pit stop was a no-brainer.
Verstappen marked him immediately.
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“When they called me, I had to look and remember we were going on lap seven,” he said. “So I thought, ‘Okay, now we can get to the end (with one more stop).’
“So, yeah, I was a little surprised when I came out of the pits. I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is a really good opportunity for us to win the race.'”
Verstappen has won seven races this season, the same as Norris and Piastri (Getty Images)
So why didn’t McLaren stop?
Norris asked his engineer Will Joseph the same question as soon as they finished pitting. Norris wanted to know, if he was racing Piastri, why didn’t they stop when his teammate was out?
Joseph responded that it took away strategic variability later in the race.
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The problem was that it was inevitably going to take away their position on a track where overtaking is almost impossible. They were going to emerge from their final pit stops with at least one car, and probably both, behind Verstappen.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the team had not pitted because they were worried others would decide to sit out.
That would have meant McLaren would have lost a leading position on a track where overtaking was almost impossible.
The problem with that reasoning was that, as the race showed, anyone who stayed out was ultimately going to lose that position to someone who had stopped. So staying out didn’t make sense.
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McLaren made no attempt to justify the decision. And Stella was as always, calm and reasoned.
“We’ll have to evaluate some factors,” he said. “Like, for example, whether there was a certain bias in the way we thought that led us as a group to think that not all the cars would necessarily have pitted.
“We will have to carry out the review very exhaustively, but the important thing is that we do it as always, in a constructive and analytical way.”
Was there another factor involved?
Rivals felt something else might be going on, something based on the way McLaren has operated this season, trying to be absolutely fair to both drivers.
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To win the race, they had to stop under the safety car. As the leader, Piastri had priority in pit stops, so in that case he would definitely stop.
But for Norris it was more complicated. If it stopped at the same time, McLaren would have had to do a so-called “double stack” stop, when they check one car and then the other.
However, doing so costs the car in second about five seconds more.
Norris was already behind Verstappen, having lost second place at the start. But this would have meant that Norris would also have fallen behind the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli, who was less than two seconds behind Norris at the time, and probably also Williams’ Carlos Sainz, who was 3.5 seconds behind the McLaren.
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Stella admitted that this was an “extra consideration” but insisted: “It was not the main reason for not stopping both cars.”
Some in the pit lane smelled a conspiracy here. The belief among a decent number of F1 insiders is that McLaren is favoring Norris this year, but they don’t want to admit it publicly.
This theory is based on races like Hungary, where Norris was allowed to operate an alternative strategy after a poor first lap left him fifth and he ended up passing Piastri, who spent most of the race ahead of him.
And Italy, where a pit stop problem left Norris behind Piastri after the team reversed the natural order of pit stops for questionable reasons, and McLaren ordered Piastri to give the place back to Norris.
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Stella wasn’t asked this question directly after the race in Qatar, but it’s pretty clear what her answer would have been. This writer did an interview with McLaren CEO Zak Brown in Austin in October, in which he dismissed as “nonsense” any idea that McLaren was favoring Norris, and reiterated the team’s policy of fairness toward both drivers.
Does it look familiar? Sebastian Vettel won the title with Red Bull in Abu Dhabi in 2010 (Getty Images)
A classic showdown is coming
For F1 as a sport, if not for McLaren, this was pretty much the perfect outcome.
This is the first time the title has been decided between more than two drivers since 2010. The pressure is intense and the excitement will be high.
Norris wanted to downplay everything on Sunday when asked how he would approach the final race and what his first F1 championship title could be.
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“It’s the same as every weekend,” he said. “I try to beat them, they try to beat me. It’s nothing different. I just want to go to bed.”
Piastri was trying to keep his disappointment at missing out on a win in perspective after a good weekend that came after a series of difficult races that had seen him lose what in late August appeared to be a 34-point lead to win the championship.
“It’s certainly not a catastrophe,” he said. “Today we made a wrong decision. That’s clear, but it’s not like the world is ending.
“So, obviously, it hurts right now, but over time, things will get better. “There have been a lot of difficult moments, this year, previous seasons together, and I feel like you always come back stronger in some of those moments.
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“But it all depends on how you deal with it. So I’m sure we’ll get through it. But yeah, obviously, right now it hurts.”
Verstappen, seeking a fifth consecutive crown, is simply relishing being in a position to win a title he spent most of the year thinking was out of reach.
“I know I’m down 12 points,” he said. “I go in there with positive energy.” I try everything I can.
“But at the same time, if I don’t win it, I still know I had an amazing season. So it doesn’t really matter. It takes a lot of pressure off of me. I’m just out there having a good time like I had today.”
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It is at McLaren where the concerns will be most intense. And your boss knows what’s at stake.
Stella has been here before. He cited two years in which the third-place driver in this type of scenario ended up winning the title. He was involved in both.
In 2007, Stella was Kimi Raikkonen’s race engineer at Ferrari when the Finn overcame a huge points gap in the final two races to beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Alonso.
In 2010, he was designing Alonso when Ferrari made a mistake in Abu Dhabi.
Stella also worked with Michael Schumacher, starting in 2000, when they won the first of five consecutive drivers’ championships, but only after the German had painfully lost three in the previous seasons.
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“Running is hard,” Stella said. “Racing can teach you difficult lessons, but this is the story of champions. I worked with Michael Schumacher. We won several titles together.
“We all think about titles now, but after Las Vegas I was thinking about how much pain Michael had to go through when he started his Ferrari experience.
“This is just the story of Formula 1. This is the true nature of racing.
“We are disappointed, but as soon as we start the review, we will be even more determined to learn from our lessons, adapt and become stronger as a team.
“And to make sure that this phenomenal, beautiful opportunity that we have to compete for the drivers’ championship and be the ones to really stop Verstappen’s dominance in this period of Formula 1, we want to approach it as the best of ourselves.”