How McLaren's howler in Qatar disguised Norris' trip before the F1 title line

One couldn't help but feel that Lando Norris had jumped into the trap that Max Verstappen had laid for him ahead of the weekend - and did so head-first. "Max generally has a good clue about a lot of things, but there’s also a lot of things he doesn’t have much of a clue about," Norris said, in response to Verstappen's claim that he'd have wrapped the title up weeks ago if he'd been driving this year's McLaren. "It’s also Red Bull’s way of going about things, this kind of aggressive nature and just talking nonsense a lot of the time."

It puts one in mind of Kevin Keegan's "I will love it if we beat them" rant, amid the throes of a fierce Premier League title fight between his Newcastle United team and Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the 1995-96 season. Ferguson had accused other teams - in particular, Leeds - of giving Newcastle an easier ride across the season, something Keegan infamously refuted to Sky Sports. There, Ferguson laid the trap, and Keegan willingly walked into it; Manchester United were fired up and beat Middlesbrough 3-0 to claim its third title in four years, while Newcastle laboured to two draws and missed out on the title by four points.

Norris' comments about Verstappen appear hubristic when measured against his performance in Qatar but, for the neutral, the result was for the best. After all we've been through in recent weeks, it would have been a crying shame if Qatar had served as a title clincher. Early-season prognostications of McLaren domination had been dispelled as Verstappen loomed onto the drivers' title scene. F1's reigning champion had been, with each passing round, appearing larger in the Woking squad's mirrors; its neatly curated garden path to a first drivers' championship since 2008 now sits in danger of being torn asunder by the Dutchman's hungering chainsaw.

Indeed, the title race does go down to Abu Dhabi, thanks to McLaren's dropping of an almighty clanger. Atoning for a few weeks of pallid form, Oscar Piastri had come to life at the right time and looked at his best around the Losail circuit; the blend of medium-high speed corners and good circuit grip had played to his strengths, leading to a straightforward sprint-race win and a 0.1s pole margin over team-mate and championship leader Norris.

Piastri was on course to reel off another win - if the first six laps were anything to go by. The correlation between circuits that the drivers enjoy and the circuits that produce generally frustrating races cannot be ignored, and the blend of grip and corner profiles make Losail one of the drivers' favourites. The problem is this: all of those elements are conducive to processional grands prix, as the high-speed corners generate turbulence and make following another car challenging at best.

As such, it was incredibly unlikely that anyone was going to pass Piastri in a conventional race. Norris played down the one-tenth deficit in qualifying, but he'd truncated his second lap of Q3 with his miscue at Turn 2 and lost the chance to start at the front. Crucially, that put him next to Verstappen on the grid - a man with everything in his grasp sat next to a man with nothing to lose.

Norris lost second to Verstappen at the start as Piastri powered ahead from pole

Photo by: Dom Gibbons / LAT Images via Getty Images

Almost predictably, Norris had a poor start when sat within the gravitational field of Verstappen, and lost a position to sit third behind the Red Bull. Piastri, aiming to breathe some life into his own stuttering title ambitions, streaked to an early lead and burst clear of the Verstappen-Norris duo. He couldn't afford to be drawn into the nonsense, nor the verbal slanging that had preceded the weekend; Piastri needed to go out and win if he was going to stay in the fight until Abu Dhabi.

But that was before lap seven. One running thread that was weaved throughout the weekend pertained to the maximum tyre stints enforced by Pirelli; the high-load nature of the Losail circuit's longer-radius corners were painful for the left-hand tyres, and thus its engineers had landed on a similar contingency measure to Qatar's 2023 race. This time, 25 laps would be the maximum that a set of tyres could clock in.

With 57 laps, this allowed teams to start with a 25-25-7 baseline for its tyre stints and then adjust accordingly. But, when Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly collided at the start of the seventh lap, it very neatly fit into the ranges that Pirelli had set out. Of course, pitting at the end of the seventh lap locked a team into two more 25-lap stints and, if both cars were to pit, one would likely lose out through a double-stack situation. Yet, the rewards associated with a cheaper opening stop under the safety car were worth it - or, in the case of the majority of cars stopping, allowed drivers to avoid a punishment for staying out.

"Everyone pitted and this made our staying out ultimately being incorrect from a race outcome point of view" Andrea Stella

Everyone stopped except three cars: Piastri, Norris, and Esteban Ocon. Ocon then stopped a lap later, putting Verstappen back into third - with a stop already completed. McLaren was in all sorts of bother, and needed to script a recovery drive of gargantuan proportions to beat Verstappen to a certain victory.

Thus, both McLarens had no option but to go hell for leather on their opening stint. One saving grace was that Fernando Alonso was sixth and at the head of a colossal DRS train - one that tailed almost to the back of the field. Both drivers aimed to build a gap big enough to soak up the average 26-second pitlane deficit, and clear the train. Carlos Sainz and Andrea Kimi Antonelli had escaped from the Alonso Express (or at his pace, the Alonso Sleeper Carriage) and would present problems ahead, but that was a future hair in the soup to consider; clearing Alonso was the priority.

Piastri made it with his lap 24 stop, while Norris was kept on the road for a final lap on his opening medium set to just make sure he'd got clear of the Spaniard. It was touch and go, but Norris produced a tidy in-lap to ensure he was ahead.

Not pitting under the safety car put both McLaren drivers on to an alternative, and slower, strategy

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

Why was McLaren the only team to stay out? Team principal Andrea Stella explained that, amid McLaren's discussions, it had never expected everyone to stop; the team believed that it was more likely that both cars would end up in traffic - of course, not a situation it would have experienced in the manner that it played out.

"Obviously all the other cars and teams had a different opinion in relation to a safety car at lap seven," Stella mused in the aftermath. "Everyone pitted and this made our staying out ultimately being incorrect from a race outcome point of view. Because Verstappen was fast and also because the tyre degradation was low, ultimately this decision was significantly penalising because clearly Oscar was in control of the race and deserved to win it and we lost the podium as well with Lando.

"For Lando there was the extra consideration, as you say, of losing additional time because of the double-stack pitstop. So it was in the consideration, but it wasn't the main reason not to stop both cars. We thought that traffic could have been a problem for both cars. And like I said before, in reality that was not the right interpretation of the situation at the time that we should have had."

Piastri's approach could not be faulted. He was utterly forlorn in the situation presented to him, his cheeks visibly lacking all colour post-race as the pallor framed his despondency. Yet, he was relentless; after stopping, he made no bones of tearing past Antonelli and put Sainz under incredible scrutiny before the Williams driver made his second stop. Furthermore, Piastri wanted to go onto the front foot. He asked his team if he could stop earlier, as he'd felt that he could do a lot more with a set of hard tyres in the final 15 laps. Rather than spend his time lessening the damage to Verstappen, he wanted to take the fight to the Red Bull driver.

At this point, Piastri likely knew that whatever he did was only going to be worthy of second. Having swallowed the bitter pill of a victory loss, he could sense his pace ailing versus that of Verstappen on the hard; when he queried if an earlier stop was possible, his engineer Tom Stallard informed Piastri that he'd need to lap below the 1m23s to close in. Sensing few better options, Piastri vowed to give it a go and called in on lap 42.

His first lap on the hards, a 1m22.996, was in the right direction. Yet, Piastri couldn't keep that going and soon fell into a pattern of 1m23s, faster than Verstappen's high 1m23s-low 1m24s, but not by enough. Even Verstappen's late back-off to ensure he got to the end couldn't help Piastri get any closer than 7.9s at the flag.

Verstappen comfortably secured victory despite Piastri's late chase

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

Norris, meanwhile, endured a less salubrious race. His second-stint pace was, when compared to his fellow frontrunners, surprisingly poor. It allowed Verstappen to get into his DRS range and begin applying pressure; to compound the issue, Norris had pulled a 21s lead over Sainz and around 24s to Antonelli, but this had stagnated. Worse, he suspected that he had floor damage after a brief excursion across the kerb/gravel combo at Turn 5.

He was in no-man's-land when McLaren pulled him in at the end of lap 44 for the hard tyre: not far enough ahead of Sainz or Antonelli to stay ahead, but not running with enough pace on the medium to build the gap any further. Thus, it was up to Norris to pass them, but it was going to be a tough ask given the nature of Qatar - even with a 12-lap tyre off-set. The start-finish straight's DRS zone wasn't long enough to bring Norris any closer to Antonelli, and nor was the braking zone heavy enough to try to mount a lunge into Turn 1.

Verstappen, then, was set to enter Abu Dhabi with just a 10-point deficit to Norris - but there was one final crumb of luck that went Norris' way. Antonelli had an off on the penultimate lap at Turn 9, one that allowed the Briton to trickle through into fourth. Thus, the live ticker of the points lead had risen to 12 points, ensuring that Norris has fewer permutations to worry about if he scores a podium at Yas Marina.

Although Qatar does tend to suit Piastri far more than Norris, the championship leader made far too many mistakes across the course of the event. He certainly didn't deserve to win it this weekend

It was postulated by Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase - and, later, advisor Helmut Marko - that Antonelli had let Norris through in a display of anti-Red Bull solidarity. This was a suggestion that incensed Toto Wolff, who noted that Mercedes was much more concerned by its fight for second in the constructors' than the drivers' title...