The pre-qualifying pick that aided Norris to fight Verstappen and "murder" Hamilton

The Silverstone crowd roared instantly. Max Verstappen and Lando Norris had launched off the front row for last Sunday’s 2023 British Grand Prix in unison, but the home hero was rapidly shooting past his good friend and into the lead. He sealed it at Abbey’s exit, then went unruffled into the first braking point at Village. The crowd dared to dream.

Eventually, Verstappen and Red Bull showed ruthless efficiency once again to claim a second Formula 1 win here for the Dutchman. That makes it six in a row for Verstappen, 11 for Red Bull – equalling the record set by McLaren in 1988. The points gap from Verstappen to Sergio Perez is now 99. The crowd had had to dream.

It wasn’t to be for Norris, still chasing that first win and somewhat haunted by his Sochi 2021 near miss. But this time he defied the F1 legend that beat him that day: Lewis Hamilton.

Here’s how Norris and McLaren made the 10th chapter of F1 2023 at least interesting with Red Bull and ended up “murdering” Hamilton and his Mercedes squad.

Verstappen’s role in Norris’s dream start

“Just a lot of wheelspin,” Verstappen said of his start. “As soon as that happens you lose so much drive, all the way to Turn 1. And then, Lando was in front.”

As Norris was making good on his promising journey towards Abbey’s rapid right, Verstappen was having to contend with the other McLaren. Oscar Piastri had followed his team-mate in accelerating through the second phase of the start nicely and he briefly had his nose ahead on the inside.

But Verstappen, as ever, was up for the fight – pinning his RB19 flat on the outside line and roaring over in front of Piastri. Verstappen then shot into Norris’s slipstream, the Briton weaving twice down the Wellington straight.

There wasn’t to be a 2021-style battle for the lead at Brooklands or Luffield, but Christian Horner had that famous Verstappen/Hamilton clash in mind when Piastri stayed on the inside on the long run down the National Pits straight and forced Verstappen to the dusty outside edge of the racing line at Copse, where he stayed second.

Norris stunned the crowd by taking the lead for the early stages of the British GP - but it wasn't to last

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“From then just a matter of settling in and staying within the DRS," said the Red Bull team boss.

That was exactly Verstappen’s plan. He remained behind Norris for the opening four tours of 52, finishing the first lap with a 0.6-second deficit. When DRS was activated at the traditional point on lap three, he was in just about the right place to use its benefit.

“It’s hard to overtake here because such large percentages of the track are flat-out,” Horner said of why Verstappen didn’t quickly blast back by Norris. “It converged all of the cars together. That makes it very difficult to make easy headway at a track that’s also pretty complicated to overtake at.”

Red Bull’s regular rivals’ absences explained

On the lap that Verstappen stole back the lead with a simple DRS-assisted run down the Wellington straight to seize the inside line at Brooklands, he, Norris and Piastri were in a class of three.

"We knew this track was going to be one of our worst tracks. Just because of the high-speed corners, this is one of the weaknesses of the car" Charles Leclerc

This was behind Norris’s actions at Brooklands, as Verstappen called it, to not “put up a fight” and be “very nice to me”. Because suddenly, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc sitting 2.4s in arrears to Piastri, 3.9s off the lead, McLaren had quite a lot to lose.

“We were surprised ourselves in the first stint to be able to keep our competitors like Ferrari and Mercedes behind,” said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. “We thought they would be a problem for us.”

The strong wind that had buffeted Silverstone all weekend long in true ex-airfield style was one of the key reasons why Ferrari, which had been fast enough in the race in Austria a week earlier to at least bother Red Bull, couldn’t match Stella’s expectations.

The wind was a particular problem at The Loop, Luffield, Stowe and Club – especially if it was clattering the cars as a crosswind as it was in FP1. This shifted to align with the lower-speed corners on Saturday, which was where Leclerc came alive despite missing all of FP2 to a short circuit on his engine.

Ferrari would slip back through the pack due to wind struggles and being caught out by the safety car

Photo by: James Sutton / Motorsport Images

Sliding would do for Ferrari in the race from its fourth and fifth grid spots, as the wind shifting back to its FP1 angle meant the “car becomes extremely difficult”, per Leclerc. He was having his rear-end shift around – the wind making even powering out of corners tough.

"We knew this track was going to be one of our worst tracks,” he added. “Just because of the high-speed corners, this is one of the weaknesses of the car.”

That is a particular strength of the McLaren, which had also gone well at Barcelona. There, the cooler temperatures helped drop Aston Martin – with a car that thrives in the lower-speed technical turns the MCL60 detests – out of the lead fight and it was a similar story at Silverstone.

But this time, Mercedes could not make the inroads against Red Bull that it had in Spain. According to team principal Toto Wolff, here it was “struggling also on the traction of the exits overall” and, of course, “the car remains a handful”.

Complicating things for Mercedes was Hamilton having “one of the worst opening laps that I've had for a while”, as he simply got caught out braking behind Carlos Sainz and George Russell at Village and fell off the road, dropping to eighth behind Fernando Alonso.

“I can't tell you the actual words I was thinking,” Hamilton said of the moments that set up his early race pursuit of the Aston.

He got by his former McLaren team-mate with a move inside at Brooklands on lap seven, but by then he was 2.9s adrift of Sainz, with Leclerc and Russell up ahead – the now lead Mercedes unable to find a way by the Ferrari’s feisty defence.

How Norris could stick with Verstappen

The crowd’s home-hero victory fever might have been punctured, but the race wasn’t totally flat once Verstappen established a lead of 0.8s on the lap he passed Norris. There was still hope if the Bristol-born racer could hang onto the rampant Red Bull.

After getting back into the lead, Verstappen never truly broke clear of Norris over the opening half of the race

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

And Norris did exactly that. On lap nine, he was still under a second adrift, with Piastri just a second further behind having been ordered to hold station behind his team-mate – echoing Monza 2021 and McLaren’s last weekend of double silverware success.

“It took a few laps to cool down the tyres again in the lead because Lando came back at me again in the DRS,” Verstappen said, explaining how he was treating the mediums all the leaders (bar Russell) had started on.

Norris was also benefiting from he and McLaren understanding that “these [fast] tracks allow us to look after the tyres well”.

“We were very competitive in high-speed [corners],” he continued. “We were almost on par with what Red Bull could achieve and actually, I would say towards the medium-speed like Turn 15, Stowe, I would say we're close to being the best car on the grid. Super, super high-speed like Turn 9, [Copse], maybe not quite so much.

"While you always want to think about ‘there could be a safety car’, it is not like you compromise your strategy because there can be a safety car. It’s one of those situations in which it's just unfortunate timing" Andrea Stella

“We definitely maintained our performance [in-race] when others seem to take a bit of a hit. And, in doing so, we could actually look after the tyres pretty well – especially when there was no thermal limitation within the tyre.”

Nevertheless, by lap 15, “once everything settled in”, per Verstappen, “we could lap-after-lap open up the gap” – and at this point, it had reached 3.1s. The leaders were lapping at a pace that Leclerc behind could not.

Over the next three laps, Verstappen pressed home his new narrow advantage – his tyre temperatures now back under control. McLaren repeatedly asked Norris if he could keep his pace up – checking if the one-stop strategy it’d picked would work out. He assured them he could.

Dark clouds drifted over Silverstone but the threat of rain never fully delivered

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Pirelli, according to its motorsport boss Mario Isola, had expected the race to play out to a two-stopper for the leaders – going soft-medium-soft. But the late pre-start cloud build over Silverstone and rain falling in the direction of Brackley, eight miles away beyond Stowe and Club at that point, convinced many teams to change their approach.

“When I was checking the weather forecast just before the start of the race, there was a chance of rain 30-40 minutes in,” Isola explained to Autosport afterwards.

“And, clearly if you start with the soft and you plan a short stint, if you change the tyres and after a few laps it starts raining, your race is damaged. If you start on the medium you have more flexibility, then you try to understand during the session if it is going to rain or not with a much more accurate prediction. That’s why I believe most of the teams decided to start on the medium.”

Some spots of rain did arrive, with Verstappen reporting “light drizzle” on lap 15. But it didn’t come down harder as it had in FP3 and so he set about extending his lead, which reached 4.0s by the end of lap 18.

Rivals’ strategy calls twist the race, Magnussen stoppage changes it

At this point, Leclerc was called in to take hards. Verstappen spotted the Ferrari come in on one of the gigantic screens broadcasting proceedings to most of the 160,000-strong race day crowd – from a record British GP weekend figure of 480,000.

He “was like: ‘So, we just stick to our strategy, right?’,” in question to his engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase. “‘Yep, stick to the strategy’,” was the typically measured reply. This meant extending the opening stint as much as possible to provide maximum strategic flexibility, with the gap to Norris growing more rapidly to a maximum of 9.7s as Verstappen’s mediums held on slightly better.

Ferrari called Sainz in eight laps after his team-mate, also to take the hards, with Russell ahead (he’d out-dragged Sainz to Abbey on lap one) doing likewise two tours later on lap 28. Russell switched his softs for mediums, but his pace on the red-walled rubber had grabbed attention.

“He did a fantastic first stint on the soft,” said Isola. “The soft was better than expected because of two elements. One was the cooler track temperatures – we had 15°C less than Friday. The track evolution, for sure, [was the other factor]. So, these two elements made the soft more usable, better, with manageable degradation quite low. And most of them decided to switch onto a medium-soft strategy [at the pitstops].”

Russell's performance starting on the softs caught the attention of the F1 pack for later in the race

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

For most, this decision was made after the most dramatic moment of the race – Kevin Magnussen stopping on the Wellington straight with the engine smoking as it expired. That was initially covered by the virtual safety car, then the real thing was called into action.

Magnussen retired on lap 32, three tours after Piastri had made a green-flag pitstop in covering off his pursuing rivals – Leclerc, battling back through the pack, and Russell.

“At that stage with Oscar, we were also starting to lose a little bit the tyres,” Stella said of Piastri’s gap to Norris growing to 3.2s by the time he pitted. “So, there was a concrete risk that we could lose the position.

“Obviously while you always want to think about ‘there could be a safety car’, it is not like you compromise your strategy because there can be a safety car. It’s one of those situations in which it's just unfortunate timing and is in the randomness of a safety car deployment rather than something that you can really predict.”

"I chose a slightly lower downforce level yesterday, which was a bit of a risk but I thought there might be a racing situation where 1-2km/h [1mph] might help me out. [In the race] it did exactly that" Lando Norris

Why McLaren had no choice but to give Norris tyres he didn’t want

Ferrari had taken advantage of the VSC to pit Leclerc again in an attempt to recover from his ruined early-stop strategy. But when things became fully neutralised by the safety car he was done over a second time – and so was Piastri thanks to Hamilton following Verstappen and Norris in on lap 33, before they caught the pace car.

The Red Bull and Mercedes got given used softs here, while McLaren gave Norris hards he audibly wasn’t happy to take. But Stella claims the orange squad had no choice.

“Initially, there was a VSC,” he explained. “And under the virtual safety car, we were happy to go on hard tyres. Because it wouldn't have been a problem in terms of warm-up. Then at some stage, the VSC was converted into [a full] safety car when we were pitting [it came out just as Verstappen reached the pitlane entry].

The safety car set up a grandstand finish to the British GP

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

“Everything was at the pitstop to put hard tyres. A last-minute change to soft would have been an operational problem.”

Isola added that “the decision [to complete a medium-hard strategy] was probably supported by some other elements that the teams have in terms of how they use the tyres”. This referred to McLaren’s fear it would lack race pace with higher tyre deg on the softer rubber as it had in Spain.

In the end, that didn’t come to pass and McLaren’s final critical call didn’t matter because of one its lead driver had already made.

How Norris repelled Hamilton’s late attack

Getting Magnussen’s car removed from the Wellington straight took an age in race time – 12 minutes from the VSC activation to racing resuming on lap 39 – as a mobile recovery crane had to reach the scene.

That was well-guarded from protestors – the memory of this race’s 2022 edition meant two lines of security (F1 staff and police) watched the grandstands overlooking the grid for any new disruption. Thankfully, this never came at any point during the race.

Norris didn’t get another chance to fight for the lead post-restart, which was unlikely anyway running C1 tyres that needed careful-but-urgent warming up. This was because Verstappen simply aced the restart. He dropped Norris heading towards Stowe after letting the safety car run clear to the pits and was 1.2s in front at the start line.

By the end, this lead was 3.8s, even with Verstappen feeling “maybe we should have gone on the hard tyre”, as “at least we could have pushed a little bit harder over the whole [second] stint”.

He was chased home by Norris, not the similarly soft-shod Hamilton. This was because Norris had successfully fought off the Mercedes’ thrilling attacks.

On the restart tour, Norris rebuffed Hamilton at Brooklands only for the older Briton to try again immediately at Luffield and this time be more forcefully cut off before he ran out of road on the chase to Copse. A lap later, Hamilton waited before taking Brooklands faster and then pulled alongside the McLaren when Norris went deep at Luffield in a rare mistake.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL60, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W14

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

But Norris had the power puff to again reach Copse ahead – just.

“They're very good in the first half [of Silverstone] – so Turn 3, Turn 4, Turns 6 and 7 Lewis could quite easily get on me,” Norris explained. “But then we've always been very good in high speed and now it's a very good strength of ours. It keeps the tyres in a good condition and I was a lot of laps quite easily flat through Turn 9. [Then] two downshifts into Maggotts and Becketts and I could always give myself that safety margin that I wanted.

“But it was nice coming out side-by-side [towards Copse on lap 40]. It was close. When I saw him throw it up the inside in [Luffield], I'm sure the fans were loving it at the same time. But I chose a slightly lower downforce level yesterday, which was a bit of a risk but I thought there might be a racing situation where 1-2km/h [1mph] might help me out. [In the race] it did exactly that. So, I'm thanking my own decision to choose a lower downforce.”

“I threw it up the inside and I tried to get past,” Hamilton said of his Luffield lunge. “But we have a little bit more drag down the straights and then through the high speed, as he mentioned, that's where they were just murdering us.”

"We have a little bit more drag down the straights and then through the high speed...that's where they were just murdering us" Lewis Hamilton

Norris’s efforts in thwarting Hamilton while his hards came up to temperature meant Wolff’s pre-restart prediction that “we would be eating up the McLarens and finish with a P2/P3, or maybe even challenge the front” never came off.

Behind, Russell, who’d gained from Leclerc’s second service, couldn’t follow his fellow Brits home. Because Piastri put in a Norris-like post-restart defensive display on the hards.

A late black-and-white flag for repeated track limits transgressions for Norris was heeded. And so this captivating display had no frustrating post-proceedings conclusion.

Norris reckoned McLaren’s best day of 2023 was heavily “track-specific”. That meant he didn’t “want to get too excited”, but the dreaming crowd did it for him.

Another superb British GP gets written into the history books

Photo by: James Sutton / Motorsport Images