How Piastri and McLaren shook off Verstappen's three-stop gambit at the Spanish GP

As any good bank robber would suggest, it's all in the getaway; Oscar Piastri might have been a handy wheelman had he fallen into the depths of organised crime, rather than the marginally less murky world of motor racing. Indeed, it was Piastri's two getaways that ensured he converted pole into the lead, and subsequently in preserving it on the lap 61 restart following a late safety car.

Sounds simple - but in reality, it wasn't; Red Bull's decision to roll the dice on a three-stop strategy might have paid off had Max Verstappen's pace proven a little bit more manageable over his shorter stints. Instead, McLaren crucially held its nerve in a strategic battle of wits and had ensured it could convert the two-stop - largely thanks to its retention of track position and subsequent reaction to Verstappen's last stop.

But let's begin with Piastri's getaway, and arguably Verstappen's as well; the Dutchman predicted that he'd be a threat to the two orange cars into the opening corner. He indeed succeeded, partially at least, as he put second-placed Lando Norris to the sword at the start. Norris' admission that he got caught out by a micro-second by the lights meant that he'd had to scramble slightly more than Piastri to get his preparatory mis en place done into Turn 1. Piastri's start was thus better, and he had the run of the Barcelona circuit's width to waft across and plant his flag on the inside line.

Norris, meanwhile, was subject to a pincer movement from the faster-starting duo of Verstappen and George Russell. He'd tried to hoover up the slipstream from Piastri when his team-mate moved in front but, when Piastri then swerved left to claim the usual line for Turn 1, the Briton was left high and dry. He could cover Russell with his braking, but not Verstappen's even-later application of the pedal into the opening corner - giving the Red Bull driver free licence to sweep around the outside and claim the inside for Turn 2.

In those situations, Norris tends to hold station and take a more patient approach; making sure the tyres are kept well preserved to build a degradation offset later on tends to align with his modus operandi. For now, he was out of the picture.

For about a lap, it seemed like Verstappen was going to try to put Piastri under scrutiny too. Knowing that he was running to a three-stop, the four-time champion felt that he could be more liberal with the use of his limited tyre life; thus, he closed the gap to the Australian enough to gather DRS for the start of the third lap. But Piastri's pace out of Turn 14 was enough to lend Verstappen barely a peek into Turn 1, shutting down any faint odours of a move from behind.

Red Bull planned a three-stop strategy for Verstappen compared to a two-stopper for the McLaren duo

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

Although Verstappen knew he was going to pit significantly earlier than the McLarens, he still couldn't afford to go full bore; even so, Piastri upped his pace enough to ensure the trailing Red Bull fell outside of DRS range on the following lap. The gap thus started to grow: two, then three seconds separated the front pair, bringing Norris back into the fight as he was given the command to push and get past Verstappen.

Once Norris cruised past his 2024 title rival at the start of the 13th lap, this kicked Red Bull's plans into action. Verstappen made his opening stop, claiming a second set of soft tyres, and immediately had to set to work clearing traffic. With fresher tyres, this didn't take much doing; he reeled off passes on Isack Hadjar and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, faced no resistance from the Ferraris as both drivers took early stops for their two-stop plans, and then cleared Russell to continue his progress back towards the McLarens. 

Verstappen and Red Bull's plan was evident; make up the ground with the first set of softs, wait for the McLarens to stop in order to take the lead, and try to use the clean air at the front of the field to buy himself more time.

"The reality is that he was fast. He was fast and when we went on the medium tyres in the second stint, we were pushing, controlling the pace and he was catching up very rapidly. More rapidly than we hoped for. We asked our drivers to push more. And both gave answers like, ‘I'm not sure I have much more pace than this’" Andrea Stella

Having closed the gap to the lead to less than the estimated pit delta of around 25 seconds, it was evident that Verstappen would accept the lead when the McLarens made their first stops. Norris took the first stop on lap 21 to pick up the medium tyre, Piastri following suit a lap later, to indeed furnish Verstappen with a 5.7-second lead once the initial pit cycle had shaken out.

Needing to do one more stop than both McLarens, Verstappen needed to find about 20 more seconds to ensure he could pay for the extra trip to the pitlane. He was at least maintaining the bulk of his gap with strong pace over the second half of that stint, reciting a flurry of laps in the high 1m19s, low 1m20s, to ensure that the McLaren duo did not cut great swathes of time out of his lead at the commencement of their medium-tyre stint.

But the time ebbed away into the middle-to-high 1m20s, while the McLarens were happily setting 1m19s laps as they gently brought the yellow-walled tyres into the frame. If any more confirmation was needed that Verstappen was due to run to a three-stopper, this was the clincher; he took the sole set of mediums he had left at the end of lap 29, restoring Piastri's position at the front of the field.

Verstappen used another set of softs for his second stint, while the McLaren pair switched to mediums

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

By the close of the next lap, Verstappen was just under 18s away from Piastri, with Norris and Charles Leclerc between them. Thanks to Verstappen's spurt of 1m18s laps, Leclerc was very swiftly dealt with in just over five laps, now leaving just a nine-second gap to Piastri just after half distance and a six-second deficit to Norris.

"We thought it's not going to be a problem because we have already overtaken him on track," McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said of Red Bull's strategy, "and we should have a decent pace advantage. But the reality is that he was fast. He was fast and when we went on the medium tyres in the second stint, we were pushing, controlling the pace and he was catching up very rapidly. More rapidly than we hoped for.

"We asked our drivers to push more. And both gave answers like, ‘I'm not sure I have much more pace than this’. So at that stage we were a little worried that it could have been a situation more open than we thought it would be in the first stint.

"It would have also been tricky for us because we had Oscar and Lando that were like 2.5 seconds apart or something. So if we needed to cover Verstappen it would have been a bit of a problem with them. But thankfully he started to tail off a bit."

Norris was told by engineer Will Joseph that Verstappen "will be in our race, keep finding pace", although his driver noted that he was struggling to do so with suspected front-left overheating issues. Norris was at least giving himself a chance by closing on Piastri slightly (offering the 2.5-second gap Stella mentioned), and eventually stalled out a gap that was now just over four seconds between him and the Dutchman.

Piastri also gave it some welly in the latter stages of his stint, growing a 2-point-something lead over Norris to five seconds. When McLaren had finally caught sight of the pace it had been targeting in its crosshairs, Verstappen's deficit started to grow once more; Red Bull conducted his third and final stop on at the end of the 47th lap.

As the race wore on, McLaren's pace advantage became evident

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McLaren knew that, by stalling out Verstappen's progress, that it was now in position to start tightening its grasp over the win. With Piastri well out in front, Norris got first priority to cover off Verstappen a lap later, coming out just ahead despite the Red Bull driver's mighty outlap effort. Piastri then received his final service on the subsequent tour, maintaining a steady 1-2 - the team was now like-for-like with Red Bull on soft tyres of a similar age.

"I felt mostly under control," Piastri reckoned. "I wasn't really expecting Max to try a three-stop race and I wasn't really expecting it to almost work as well as it did either.

"There was a bit going on at that point, definitely. And just with all the traffic and the blue flags as well, that made the race a bit more interesting than I wanted. But apart from that, I felt pretty much in control and I could increase my pace when I needed to."

"It's pretty hard to complain with the results we've had this weekend. And I think more so than that, just the effort that's gone in analysing some of the things from last week that we could have done better. I think we turned it around very nicely and got back to the form we wanted to be on" Oscar Piastri

Piastri, then, was almost home and hosed. Norris, meanwhile, would have had his heart in his mouth as he encountered traffic in the form of Liam Lawson and Oliver Bearman - the two duelling hard over 12th position - at Turn 1. Like a beleaguered salaryman on the M25 at rush hour, Norris almost found himself in the wrong lane and got baulked by the midfielders' skirmish, but just about nipped past them both. To make things fair, Verstappen got a similar moment of congestion in trying to nip past Bearman at Turn 5, effectively evening out a one-second gap between them. Norris then started to gap the Red Bull, effectively putting an end to that challenge.

But McLaren's hopes of a 1-2 weren't quite complete, as Antonelli's oil leak resulted in the Italian rookie having to peel off into the gravel at Turn 10. McLaren's decision to call both drivers in for a final six-lap shootout, putting both on left-over softs from qualifying, might have gone awry - but there was just enough time to double-stack them. Verstappen also pitted, but his own chances were dealt a colossal blow at this point: Red Bull only had a set of hard tyres left to equip him with. 

Had Verstappen not stopped, he'd have been on 14-lap-old softs (albeit half of those under the safety car) and likely prey to the McLarens, but he might have been able to hold on for third if he'd kept enough life in them. On the hards, he was out of the reckoning - McLaren's pit wall staffers must have been beside themselves when they'd seen the white-walled tyres bolted onto the #1 car.

A late safety car threatened to derail McLaren's bid for victory, but Piastri had it under control

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

Piastri still had the task of nailing the restart. He backed the pack up as early as Turn 11 when he'd seen the safety car lights go out, and then gunned it on the run to Turn 13 to get up to speed for the brace of high-speed right-handers. Norris couldn't quite stick with him, but left Verstappen in his wake - instead, the Red Bull was left to battle with the soft-shod Ferrari of Leclerc and Mercedes of Russell. And we all know what happened next...the subsequent Turn 5 collision with Russell led to Verstappen falling back to 10th after copping a 10-second penalty.

"It's definitely up there," Piastri responded when asked if this was his strongest F1 win. "I don't know if it's the best one, but certainly it's been a strong one. It's pretty hard to complain with the results we've had this weekend.

"And I think more so than that, just the effort that's gone in analysing some of the things from last week that we could have done better. I think we turned it around very nicely and got back to the form we wanted to be on. That's what I'm very satisfied with this weekend."

In a weekend where Red Bull was supposed to challenge McLaren more readily, given its proclivity for performance around circuits with similar characteristics to Barcelona, Piastri took his chances with great gusto. Having now rebuilt his championship lead to Norris to 10 points, the Melburnian looks to be in good shape - and McLaren's hopes of delivering a first drivers' title for over a decade have been afforded a healthy boost by Verstappen's late-race indiscretions. 

Piastri has a 10-point championship lead heading to Canada in two weeks' time

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images