McLaren’s pit stop strategy falters in Qatar
Formula 1 heads towards its first championship finale featuring more than two contenders in 15 years, as Max Verstappen of Red Bull secured a commanding victory at the Qatar Grand Prix, capitalising on a critical strategic misstep by McLaren.
“Obviously not our greatest day,” conceded McLaren driver Lando Norris, an understatement considering his team’s costly error that denied them a potential win, albeit not for him.
Norris’ lead in the championship standings has been narrowed by Verstappen to 12 points ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix next weekend, with his McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, trailing by an additional four points.
Piastri appeared momentarily stunned after the race, processing the transformation of a seemingly certain victory into second place behind Verstappen, and the shift of his championship position from second to third.
“It’s pretty painful,” the Australian remarked.
Norris remains the favourite to clinch the title, requiring only a third-place finish in Abu Dhabi next Sunday to secure the championship, even if Verstappen wins the race.
However, the Qatar race served as a reminder that anything is possible.
It’s worth recalling the last time the final race featured such a tightly contested battle among multiple drivers.
In 2010, Fernando Alonso of Ferrari entered the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with an eight-point lead over Red Bull’s Mark Webber and a 15-point advantage over Sebastian Vettel.
In a memorable championship finale, Ferrari’s strategic miscalculation paved the way for Vettel to claim his first title.
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This marks the second consecutive challenging weekend for McLaren, following the disqualification of Norris and Piastri in Las Vegas, where they had originally finished second and fourth, respectively.
Prior to the Qatar race weekend, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown likened Verstappen to a resilient horror movie villain.
Ironically, it was McLaren who experienced their own nightmare at Lusail.
They inadvertently handed Verstappen a victory, intensifying the pressure on their drivers at the final race weekend, a prospect that is exhilarating for neutral observers but undoubtedly nerve-wracking for Norris and McLaren.
When the safety car was deployed on lap seven due to a collision involving Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, the obvious decision was to pit for fresh tires. In fact, every team except McLaren made that choice.
The rationale behind this clear decision was that tire supplier Pirelli had mandated a 25-lap maximum for each set of tires due to the risk of failures caused by the challenging corners and sharp kerbs of the Qatar track.
With 50 laps remaining when the safety car emerged, a pit stop at that moment allowed for two 25-lap stints.
Given that a pit stop under safety car conditions saves approximately nine seconds compared to a pit stop under green flag conditions, and considering that this would have been a one-stop race without Pirelli’s regulations, pitting was a straightforward choice.
Verstappen recognised this immediately.
“When they called me in, I had to look and remember that we were going into lap seven,” he said. “So I was, like, OK, now we can go to the end [with one more stop].”
“So then, yeah, I was a bit surprised when I came out of the pit. I was like, ‘OK, I think this is a very good opportunity now for us to win the race.'”
Verstappen has won seven races this season – the same as Norris and Piastri
Norris questioned his engineer Will Joseph as soon as they opted not to pit, asking why they did not stop if he was racing Piastri and his teammate was staying out.
Joseph responded that it would limit their strategic options later in the race.
However, it also inevitably meant sacrificing track position at a circuit where overtaking is notoriously difficult. They were destined to emerge from their final pit stops with at least one car, and likely both, behind Verstappen.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella explained that the team did not pit due to concerns that other teams might choose to stay out.
That would have meant McLaren had given up a leading track position at a track where overtaking was all but impossible.
The problem with that reasoning was that, as the race proved, anyone who stayed out was ultimately going to lose that position to someone who had stopped. So staying out made no sense.
McLaren did not attempt to justify the decision, and Stella remained his composed self.
“We’ll have to assess some factors,” he said. “Like, for instance, whether there was a certain bias in the way we were thinking that led us as a group to think that not all cars necessarily would have pitted.
“We will have to go through the review in a very thorough way, but what’s important is that we do it as usual, in a way that is constructive, is analytical.”
Rivals suggested that other factors might have influenced the decision, linked to McLaren’s approach this season of ensuring fairness between their drivers.
To win the race, they had to stop under the safety car. As the leader, Piastri had pit-stop priority, so in that scenario he would definitely stop.
But for Norris it was more complicated. If he stopped at the same time, McLaren would have had to do a so-called “double-stack” stop, when they service one car and then the other.
Doing that, though, costs the car that is second about an extra five seconds.
Norris was already behind Verstappen, having lost second place at the start. But this would have meant he would also have dropped 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 3.5secs adrift of the McLaren.
Stella admitted that this was an “extra consideration,” but insisted: “It wasn’t the main reason not to stop both cars.”
Some in the pit lane detected a possible underlying motive. A significant number of F1 insiders believe that McLaren is favouring Norris this year, while publicly denying it.
This theory is based on races such as Hungary, where Norris was allowed to operate an alternate strategy after a bad first lap dropped him to fifth, and ended up beating Piastri, who spent most of the race ahead of him.
And Italy, where a pit-stop problem dropped Norris behind Piastri after the team had inverted the natural pit-stop order for questionable reasons, and McLaren ordered Piastri to give Norris the place back.
Stella was not directly asked this question after the race in Qatar, but it’s pretty clear what his answer would have been. This writer did an interview with Brown in Austin in October, in which he dismissed as “nonsense” any idea McLaren were favouring Norris, and reiterated the team’s policy of fairness to both drivers.
Seem familiar? Sebastian Vettel won the title for Red Bull in Abu Dhabi in 2010
For F1 as a sport, if not for McLaren, this was pretty much the perfect outcome.
This is the first title decider between more than two drivers since 2010. The pressure is intense, and the excitement will match it.
Norris downplayed expectations on Sunday when asked about his approach to the final race and the possibility of securing his first F1 championship title.
“It’s the same as every weekend,” he said. “I try and beat them, they try and beat me. It’s nothing different. I just want to go to bed.”
Piastri sought to maintain perspective regarding his disappointment at losing a victory following a strong weekend, especially after a series of challenging races that had erased his once-promising 34-point lead in the championship standings.
“It’s certainly not a catastrophe,” he said. “We made a wrong decision today. That’s clear, but it’s not like the world ended.
“So, obviously, it hurts at the moment, but with time things will get better. There’s been lots of difficult moments – this year, previous seasons together – and I feel like you always become stronger through some of these moments.
“But it all depends on how you deal with it. So I’m sure we’ll get through it. But, yeah, obviously, at the moment, it does hurt.”
Verstappen, aiming for a fifth consecutive championship, is reveling in the opportunity to compete for a title that he had previously considered out of reach.
“I know that I’m 12 points down,” he said. “I go in there with just positive energy. I try everything I can.
“But at the same time, if I don’t win it, I still know that I had an amazing season. So, it doesn’t really matter. It takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m just out there having a good time like I had today.”
The sense of unease is likely to be most palpable at McLaren, and their team principal recognizes the magnitude of the situation.
Stella has experienced similar scenarios before, referencing two instances where the driver in third place ultimately won the title, both of which he was involved in.
In 2007, Stella served as the race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari when the Finnish driver erased a significant points deficit in the final two races to defeat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Alonso.
In 2010, he was engineering Alonso when Ferrari made a crucial mistake in Abu Dhabi.
Stella also worked alongside Michael Schumacher, starting in 2002, during the German driver’s streak of five consecutive drivers’ championships, which followed painful defeats in 1997, 1998, and 1999.
“Racing is tough,” Stella said. “Racing may give you tough lessons, but this is the history of champions. I worked with Michael Schumacher. We won several titles together.
“We all think about the titles now, but after Vegas I was thinking how much pain Michael had to go through when he started his experience at Ferrari.
“This is just the history of Formula 1. This is the true nature of racing.
“We are disappointed, but as soon as we start the review, we will get even more determined to learn from our lessons, adapt, and be stronger as a team.
“And make sure that this phenomenal, beautiful opportunity that we have to compete for the drivers’ championship and be the ones that actually stop Verstappen’s dominance in this period of Formula 1, we want to face it as the best of ourselves.”
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