One lap from victory? The story of Lando Norris's Imola charge

Although the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola was a fairly standard one-stop event and there was no safety car interruption for once, the strategy intrigue wasn’t so much about pitstop timings as how to use the tyres.

The weather forecast impacted heavily upon this, at least for Lando Norris. McLaren had chosen a set-up based around a Sunday forecast considerably cooler than what we actually got. It had a lot of front wing angle and the camber and castor angles were set quite aggressively in the expectation of the sort of cool conditions which typically induce graining and wear of the front tyres here if they cannot be worked hard enough. But race day was actually even hotter than the practice days, with a track temperature of over 43°C.

This slightly mismatched set-up had a profound effect on the way Norris had to run his race. The challenge now was to keep the tyre surfaces from overheating early in the stint when the tread gauge was thick. “We struggled too much at the beginning of the race,” he said. “I had to do so much of an introduction to the tyres and bring them up so gently and look after them. If I didn’t, I just would have fallen off a cliff like the others. So my only chance was to drive my race. And that meant being under pressure from Charles for more laps than I would have liked. As soon as I cleared the traffic and got back into my own rhythm, I felt good with the car. The tyres came back and I could push and I was happy.”

But it meant that he was 6sec behind Max Verstappen at the end of the first stint. When Verstappen had tyre trouble 15 laps from the end, Norris had first to make up the 6sec gap before being in a position to attack the Red Bull. After regretting not having one more lap with which to attack the limping Verstappen, Norris inevitably thought back to his enforced conservative pace earlier. “If I could do the race again,” he said, “I would probably take out about four holes of the front wing.”

Verstappen meanwhile had the opposite tyre problem. Despite the hot track he was struggling to keep temperature in his front tyres once he’d worn down the tread gauge.

“On the hard tyres after about 10 laps I was like, I’m not sure I can bring this to the end,” he explained, “because the tyres just fell out of the operating window and it was like driving on ice, really snappy and you can feel when the tyres are not gripping any more like at Turn 7, where I almost ended up in the grandstand. Difficult, and I had to take really weird lines.”

This too was a consequence of some set-up decisions earlier in the weekend. The wholesale changes made from Friday to Saturday to get the one-lap pace needed meant they were taking an untried set-up into the race. Whether that was a strategic error is debatable, however. Essentially he won this race through the track position his pole had bought him – and that lower downforce wing gave him the straightline speed which was essential to his defence against Norris.

“As soon as [I heard] Lando was half a second a lap faster, I was like, ‘Whoa,’” said Verstappen. “But on the other hand, you can’t do anything about it. So I was trying to do my pace. You cannot suddenly try and force a half a second out of it when you don’t have the balance. I was trying to not make mistakes, trying to drive around the balance issues that I had and be quick on the straight. So that’s what I think helped me at the end. Also, with the rear wing, we were quite fast on the straight. That probably helped in the last few laps to defend.”