F1 reports: Italian, Azerbaijan and Singapore Grands Prix

McLaren’s prospects of beating Red Bull to the world constructors’ championship were becoming quite realistic as we came into this three-race sequence. The MCL38 was being developed into an ever-quicker machine as Max Verstappen continued to struggle with a recalcitrant RB20. Lando Norris’s prospects of catching Verstappen’s big lead in the drivers’ championship were more remote, but given his dominant victory at Zandvoort just the faint chance potentially presented McLaren with the thorny problem of team orders. It was a dilemma which still hadn’t been resolved as the circus descended upon Monza, F1’s oldest track.

“Norris needed to make any support from Piastri a non-issue”

Norris really needed to make any support from Oscar Piastri a non-issue by out-qualifying him and driving away. At Monza he achieved the first part, with a great pole position, his fourth of the year. But within two corners Piastri had turned the tables, with an audacious out-braking move into the Roggia chicane. Even worse than that, in avoiding contact with the other McLaren, Norris got wildly out of shape mid-chicane, allowing Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari to grind ahead on the run up to Lesmo 1. That completely changed the complexion of this race from what it might have been – a Zandvoort-replicating straightforward Norris victory – to something quite different.

Around Monza the Ferrari was the only car of vaguely comparable performance to the McLaren. This came as a surprise to some, given its mid-season difficulties – but shouldn’t have. Because Monza – and Baku and Singapore – are perfectly laid out to play to the Ferrari’s strengths (great braking and slow corner rotation, strong lowdown punch out of the corners) and trivialise its weakness (long high-speed corners). Furthermore, there was a big floor upgrade here designed to address its previous bouncing issues, the value of which wouldn’t be clear until we got past this three-race sequence of outlier tracks.

George Russell’s Mercedes might have been able to give chase the way Leclerc did, but he got bundled down the escape road with a damaged front wing within seconds of the start by trying to go around the outside of the McLarens into the first chicane. That narrowed things down to McLaren vs Leclerc, with the Ferrari the meat in the sandwich.

The practices had suggested that the circuit’s new surface and less severe kerbs had reduced lap times enough to place significantly more stress on the front tyres, inducing graining and making what has traditionally been a one-stop race into an optimum two-stop. But Carlos Sainz, running an early fourth, was disciplining himself to run at a conservative pace and intending to one-stop on the assumption that his team-mate would stop twice.

Up front, Piastri pushed on. Leclerc and Norris followed a few seconds back, the Ferrari apparently quite happy running at McLaren pace. The first stops came and went – and McLaren undercut Norris past Leclerc, much to the latter’s irritation. But it was going to be the making of Leclerc’s victory.

With the McLarens now running 1-2, Leclerc followed a few seconds back, still on much the same pace as them and now a long way clear of Sainz once the latter had made his later stop. Just as expected, Piastri and Norris were finding that their front-left tyres were graining as they aged. It even led to Norris locking up and going straight on across the run-off at Roggia on one occasion, an incident which hastened him being called in for his second stop. Piastri stopped a few laps later – and the assumption in the McLaren garage was that Leclerc would soon be following them in.

But actually, as soon as Leclerc got into free air and he was able to wear away the graining, he found that his fronts were still in good shape. The car felt great. He didn’t need to stop again. Piastri rejoined almost 10sec behind the Ferrari with just 14 laps to go. As the Monza crowd came to realise what was unfolding, a great cheer would go up every time Leclerc completed another lap still leading. He was 2.6sec ahead of the charging McLaren as they took the chequer, for Leclerc’s second Monza Ferrari victory in five years.

As McLaren took stock from a Monza race, in which Verstappen had limped to an uncompetitive sixth place, team principal Andrea Stella decided he needed to act. Before Azerbaijan, he confirmed that a light-touch team orders policy would be in play in support of Norris’s title challenge. No longer would Piastri be able to attack him from behind and there could be occasions when Piastri’s ideal race would be strategically compromised if it aided Norris’s chances. But if Piastri was in the lead, even if Norris was behind him, Piastri would not be asked to surrender victory. The policy had been discussed with both drivers and this was what was agreed.

An inopportunely timed yellow flag in the Q1 part of qualifying in Azerbaijan made the new team agreement irrelevant, as Norris failed to make it past the first hurdle and Piastri qualified on the front row. Oscar lined up next to polesitter Leclerc who, as ever, was spectacularly fast around the Baku streets. Sainz was third-fastest albeit 0.5sec adrift of Leclerc. He lined up ahead of Russell and Pérez, the latter out-qualifying Red Bull team-mate Verstappen for the first time this season. Two drivers in just their second grands prix – Franco Colapinto for Williams and Oliver Bearman for Haas – impressed heavily, as they each out-qualified their experienced team-mates. Colapinto made Q3, Bearman only just missed it.

Leclerc and Piastri were initially in a race of their own, with the McLaren repeatedly bobbing around in the braking zone at the end of the long Caspian Straight but never quite having enough of a speed advantage to make the pass work. There was one occasion where Piastri later felt he spurned a possible opportunity – which he came to regret as his front tyres had given their best after a few laps and he was obliged to drop back into the clutches of Pérez.

As the pitstop window began to open, Piastri’s focus was very much on Pérez, with Leclerc out of reach on his way to an apparent victory. Red Bull brought Pérez in early – on lap 13 – to stave off an undercut threat from the following Sainz. This was where McLaren played the team game but with an ironic twist. Norris, from his 15th place starting slot, had begun on the hard tyre and would be running a very long first stint. He was making steady progress and by a happy coincidence for McLaren was perfectly placed to delay Pérez for a couple of laps after the latter’s stop. With Pérez unable to take advantage of his new tyres, Piastri was able to lap fast enough in those two laps to ensure he came out still ahead of the Red Bull. So Norris had been used strategically to help Piastri!

The news just kept getting better for Piastri. Ferrari had pulled in Leclerc a lap after the Piastri stop. But the Ferrari was extremely reluctant to bring its new hard tyres up to temperature and Leclerc’s out-lap was 3sec slower than Piastri’s had been. Even on the following lap the rubber was still under-temperature and from being 6sec behind before the stops, Piastri was now within striking range…

Piastri’s engineer Tom Stallard had only just sounded a precautionary note, reminding his driver that he’d damaged the first set of tyres by attacking Leclerc too hard early in the stint. But Piastri, with that missed overtaking opportunity in the first stint still in his mind, was in no mood to conserve. Reasoning that his best way to look after his tyres was to get in clear air, he launched a spectacular overtake on Leclerc under braking for Turn 1. It was from a long way back. Leclerc saw him but, nervous about braking too hard on his still cool tyres, didn’t think he’d need to defend. Even Piastri later admitted that he was only 50/50 on whether the move would work. With his steering on lock as his front right ran perilously close to the exit barrier, he was through.

But this was only lap 20. He now had to fend off Leclerc for 31 laps. So began a mesmerising contest as they went at it nose-to-tail, flat-out on the robust hard-compound tyres, a dice made all the more thrilling as Pérez came into the picture, sitting right on Leclerc’s tail and occasionally taking a look into the braking zone.

On several occasions Leclerc got side-by-side with the McLaren, with Piastri having to chop across his bows on occasion. The Ferrari driver was surprised at the McLaren’s straightline speed – and this observation took on greater significance post-race when the rearwards-facing TV camera on Piastri’s car showed the rear wing deforming at the outboard ends in a way which would reduce drag, see opposite.

“Piastri reckoned this was the most stressful day of his life”

Piastri later reckoned this was the most stressful day of his life as he focused on not allowing Leclerc any opportunity. Into the race’s last few laps Sainz in fourth place caught up with Pérez, making it four cars nose-to-tail for several laps. The outcome was far from certain. Eventually it was Leclerc’s tyres which gave up first – three laps from the end. The sudden loss of grip from the Ferrari allowed Piastri to canter away – and simultaneously bunched up Pérez and Sainz behind him. Pérez tried for the outside of Leclerc at Turn 1, but was hung out wide as the Ferrari driver desperately defended on his grip-less tyres. This lost Pérez momentum, allowing Sainz to pounce for third. Carlos then took a look around his team-mate’s outside up to Turn 2, allowing Pérez to get to his inside as they exited onto the short straight which follows. Sainz moved slightly left, Pérez stayed absolutely level, unwilling to concede ground, their wheels interlocked and they crashed each other into the barriers. This got Leclerc off the hook and gave Russell’s Mercedes a surprise podium. Piastri was way up the road and duly took his second career victory in truly impressive fashion. There was only the narrowest of windows for a victory, literally a split-second opportunity, and he’d taken it with total commitment, then followed up with a masterly defence.

Norris, after playing his part in his team-mate’s victory, came fourth, passing Verstappen shortly before the race came under the virtual safety car for the Sainz/Pérez accident.

Into the Singapore weekend the talk was all about McLaren’s ‘mini-DRS’ rear wing which had aided Piastri’s Baku victory. Ferrari and Red Bull were particularly vexed about whether the McLaren’s slot gap had always been between 10-15mm (as required by the regulations) in the race. After a lot of badgering, the FIA advised McLaren that it needed to control the slot gap more carefully, essentially telling the team it did not want to see that level of flex in future.

But Singapore is a high-downforce track, so the low-downforce mini-DRS wing was not scheduled to be used there anyway. McLaren remained the class of the field regardless. Its competitiveness was greater than at Baku and Monza. Just as at the previous high-downforce tracks of Zandvoort and the Hungaroring, it was dominant. Or Norris’s was. He was The Man from Friday through to the chequered flag, taking a pole along the way. He pulled out half a minute on the chasing Red Bull of Verstappen, helped by this being the first Singapore GP not requiring a safety car.

Piastri didn’t dial himself in as well to the place as his title-chasing team-mate and a wild slide on his final Q3 lap bundled him down to row three behind Hamilton and Russell in the slower Mercedes. An additional DRS zone didn’t make passing any easier and Piastri had to run long so as to get much newer tyres than the Mercs for the second stint. Although this allowed him to get past them, he was by this time a long way behind Verstappen who did a superb damage-limitation job in defending his points lead, which was down to 52 with six races to go.

“Norris was denied the extra point for fastest lap by Ricciardo”

Norris was denied the extra point for fastest lap by Daniel Ricciardo who was brought in from near the back in his RB with two laps to go for a new set of soft tyres, thereby bowing out of F1 with an extra little token. This was expected to be his last race before being replaced by Liam Lawson.