“When we got undercut, I was thinking we’d lost the win,” he recounted. “But then once both pitted, I actually picked up quite a lot of front grip and, being the last car, I didn’t have much to lose by trying the one-stop. But we did a really, really good job with that front left, which has been very, very tricky for everybody. We had a lot of front graining, but managed to take that front grip again.”
Later Piastri came to realise that his graining tyre had not been dead. As the tyre wore, so the graining would clean up, as Leclerc and Sainz had demonstrated. He felt sure he could’ve held on, regardless of the Ferrari being easier on the fronts.
“There are things we could have done a bit differently from a strategy point of view and also a driving point of view to keep the options open a little bit more,” rued Piastri. “It [should have been] a matter of just kind of sticking with the graining and getting through it. But given in practice when that happened you basically couldn’t hit the brake pedal because you turned your front left into a 50 cent coin, it seemed like a very risky thing to do so.”
The other risky thing to do was that first lap pass on Norris. There were still no team orders in play at McLaren despite the pole-setting Norris’ closer gap to Verstappen’s points lead. So Norris was kicking himself afterwards for being too conservative into the braking zone for Roggia on the first lap. “I should have just braked a bit later,” he said. “Simple as that. But sometimes it’s easier said than done. Oscar obviously braked on the limit and gave me space; it was just about enough. But if I’d braked two metres later, you don’t know and you can’t predict. Two metres later and it could easily have been a crash. The easiest thing is just to brake way later and force him off and kind of treat it like it was anyone else. I obviously took it easy. I saw we had a massive gap behind, so maybe I was just a bit too much on the cautious side and paid the price.”
Sainz was always on for a one-stopper, before Ferrari decided to go all in with both drivers
Ferrari
Afterwards McLaren team boss Andrea Stella conceded that from now, especially with Verstappen’s struggles, they will look at prioritising Norris for the sake of his title chances.
Hamilton’s efforts at pressuring Sainz’s fourth just ate up the Merc’s tyres, and he finished a two-stopping fifth, a long way clear of Verstappen in a Red Bull that just did not want to change direction and which ate even its hard tyres excessively. His sixth place was being closed down fast by the Merc of the recovering George Russell whose race got off to a disastrous start as he contested the first corner with the McLarens but got bundled down the escape road with a damaged front wing. In the closing stages he passed Perez who said his Red Bull changed direction like a boat, very much in contrast to Leclerc’s well-balanced Ferrari. And that’s not a sentence anyone would have expected to hear just a few races ago.