I REALLY wanted to be the better person and start out with the positives from Qatar, but there’s nowhere else to start. When a 4-time Formula 1 World Champion admits that he’s only in contention for another title because the team with the best car and talented drivers has totally screwed up their season, that message is heard around the world. Max Verstappen sat down with F1 commentator Chris Medland on Thursday before the race at the Lusail International Circuit to share his thoughts on the championship battle. Among other admissions of a less-than-ideal season, Max said: “We are in this fight still, because of other people’s failures, not because, if you look at the whole season, of what we did.”… “If we would have been in the position [of having] how dominant a car they had, let’s say that championship would have been over a long time ago.”
Those failures have come directly from McLaren’s pit wall in the form of ‘Papaya Rules’ and race manipulation. They’ve come from poor oversight and preparation padded by bad strategy. McLaren has eroded a 104 point lead in over Max the Driver Championship down to 12 points. Unthinkable in modern racing. To do that, a team would have to have multiple DNFs and/or DQs and an abundance of critical errors. That’s exactly what has happened.
The latest catastrophic mistake came 7 laps into the night race at Qatar. The race mandated a maximum of 25 laps per tire run and the race was 57 laps. When a safety car was called in lap 7, the obvious call was to drop the first set of tires, go for a medium if you had them, (soft if you were willing to risk longevity for speed, which Lando should have) and have one more stop in the race. A pit stop under a safety car takes 10 seconds less than a normal pit stop. Of course you take it. Not taking it puts you immediately 10 seconds behind the field on your first stop. Evidently only I, everyone else in the world who was watching on television, the entire paddock, and all teams, except McLaren, understood that. They didn’t pit.
The end result was P1 Max, P2 Oscar Piastri, and P3 Carlos Sainz. In a race where Lando Norris could have clinched the title by earning just 1 point more than his rivals, he didn’t even make the podium, coming in 4th. It all comes down to Abu Dhabi now. If Lando places P1-3, he’s the Champion. Max wins and Lando places 3rd or lower, Max is the Champion. Neither Max or Lando place better than 4th and Oscar wins, he’ll get the title. Gut-wrenching outcome for Norris.
Max did get it right, and that was thanks to Red Bull’s Principal Strategy Engineer, Hannah Schmitz. She had made the decision pre-race to pit under a safety car if there was one after lap 7 and called Max to the pit with confidence. Her team questioned her decision after they saw the McLaren’s were staying out, but she stood firm and called Max into his box. That decision put Hannah on the podium with Max, accepting the constructor’s trophy on behalf of the team. This would be the second time Hannah received the award for her team. The first, for a similar race-winning safety car strategy in Brazil in 2022.
As the top three took the podium, the cameras caught Lando walking under the stage. He looked up and smiled, seeing his best friend receive the P3 trophy. It was a major win for both the Spanish driver and for Williams as a team. Carlos’s win clinched 5th place in the Constructors Championship for the Grove Team, up from 9th. The jump means millions of dollars in development funds and testing resources. It means they have a better chance for next year than they could have possibly imagined. And it certainly validated Carlos’s move to Williams as the right choice.
5 more days until we see the resolution. Regardless of the outcome, McLaren has some serious rethinking to do about the way they race, how they favor their drivers, and how to operate from a position of integrity. They played a sloppy game this season and it may have cost them everything. Hopefully it won’t be “all too much for little Lando”.
