McLaren’s surprising strategy admission after F1 Hungarian GP

It is a long-standing matter of humour in the Formula 1 paddock that the “possible race strategies” infographic Pirelli circulates on Sunday mornings often bears no relationship at all to the way the race pans out.

So it proved at the Hungaroring as Lando Norris ended up being effectively forced onto an unfavoured one-stop strategy after a poor start, only for it to work in his favour. And he wasn’t the only one – Max Verstappen could have finished fifth or six rather than ninth, reckoned Red Bull driver advisor Helmut Marko, if he had stopped once rather than twice.

On Saturday the mood music from Pirelli was unequivocal about a two-stop being superior, despite the possibility of overnight rain effecting a reset on the new track surface.

“At the moment a one-stop is more or less 10 seconds slower,” said Pirelli motorsport manager Mario Isola on Saturday evening. “With the level of degradation that we measured yesterday [Friday]. So if it is cooler and you are able to manage better the tyre, these 10 seconds could be less. That’s why I believe that two-stop is still the preferred choice.”

Conditions were indeed cooler although the shape of the race was dictated by the events on the opening lap, when Norris – from third on the grid – moved over to the inside on the approach to Turn 1 with a view to passing team-mate Oscar Piastri, who had qualified second to Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. The move wasn’t on and, in backing out, Norris lost track position to George Russell and then to Fernando Alonso.

While he quickly passed Alonso back for fourth place, Norris was then unable to escape the ‘dirty air’ of Russell’s Mercedes. As Alonso fell back from this battle, bottling up the cars behind, the window for a one-stop race begin to creak open.

Indeed, this quickly became Norris’s only option, while McLaren’s strategy for Piastri was dictated by the need to get past Leclerc somehow.

“Our baseline strategy today was a two-stop strategy,” said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella in his post-race briefing.

“We didn’t think necessarily that the one-stop was possible. So with Oscar we tried to go on a good, deterministic, two-stop strategy, trying to pass Leclerc in the first stop, then we tried to extend in the second stop to have a tyre delta in order to have those few tenths of a second to be able to pass Leclerc, and this did work.”

But it is between these two Piastri pit visits that the momentum swung towards a one-stop. When he stopped for his first set of hard-compound Pirellis at the end of lap 18 he forced Ferrari to respond, but Leclerc emerged ahead and they both filtered out of the pits behind Alonso – who had begun to pick up his pace three laps earlier, moving into the gap McLaren and Ferrari thought they had.

Although both Leclerc and Piastri got by Alonso as the lap count entered the 20s, it became increasingly clear the Aston Martin driver was aiming to extend his first stint and that this would be problematic for Russell and Norris, should they pit. Russell proved this by taking four laps to pass the two-time F1 world champion.

By this point doing anything other than a one-stop was looking unfavourable for Norris, and Piastri was already alert to the possibility that his strategy was sub-optimal. While his earlier responses to race engineer Tom Stallard asking about stopping once were in the negative, he began to pitch questions about whether it would be possible to stay out for the remainder of the race.

The tone suggested that in trying to undercut Leclerc, he had given Norris an opening to pass them both. So even as they homed in on Norris before he stopped at the end of lap 31, the die was cast.

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

“When it comes to Lando and the one-stop strategy, when we extended, leaving Lando out, we didn’t think that the one-stop would have been possible still,” Stella revealed.

“But credit to Lando, he managed to put together some very strong sectors and lap times with tyres that were relatively used. So we somehow convinced ourselves that the one-stop was starting to get in the game as we progressed with the first stint.

“It wasn’t like entering the race with a one- or a two-stop and we would have picked them being equivalent. We thought that the two-stop would be the dominant strategy today.”

Norris set several fastest laps in his early phase on the hards and it was at this point that the tenor of the conversations between Stallard and Piastri changed: the Australian driver was given a choice between “undercut on Leclerc or tyre delta to Lando”.

McLaren then attempted some subterfuge, telling Piastri to “box this lap” and deploying its mechanics onto the pit apron on lap 39. Ferrari responded by pre-emptively bringing in Leclerc to block the undercut – but instead Piastri extended his stint for another six laps.

Norris had some assistance when Russell pitted out of his way at the end of lap 42, by which point he was 9.5s off Piastri and inherited the lead when his team-mate pitted. Crucially, Piastri had lost ground hand over fist while extending – on lap 44 alone he lost 2s relative to Norris.

Piastri then had to use the best of his tyre delta to pass Leclerc on the road.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli

Naturally, given how the race transpired, Stella was asked if the team had consciously favoured Norris over Piastri, but he decisively ruled this out.

“We wanted to give Oscar enough of a tyre delta to pass Leclerc, but also to have a fair chance on Lando, because that would have meant being on an optimal two-stop,” he said.

“So we wanted to make sure that, thinking about Leclerc, we were not deviating too much from an optimal two-stop, because that would have been unfair to Oscar in relation to his competition with Lando. And we also checked with Oscar what his preference was, and certainly he wanted to have an opportunity to win the race.

“And we thought that with enough tyre delta to Leclerc, Oscar would have had a chance in the end.”