What McLaren can learn from Michael Schumacher after F1 Qatar GP blunder

Hindsight unfailingly affords total clarity – and its optics look bad for McLaren after a Qatar Grand Prix about which the best thing which could be said of the outcome is that it was less catastrophic than the Las Vegas round which preceded it.

Team boss Andrea Stella has promised a thorough review of the decision-making process which led to McLaren not pitting either of its drivers when the safety car was deployed on lap seven in Qatar while they were running first and third on the road. All the other cars still in the race except Esteban Ocon – who had already pitted after one lap – broke for the pits.

While this left those cars committed to stopping after another 25 laps, given the cap put in place by Pirelli on tyre use for this weekend, it also locked McLaren into having two more stops and needing another safety car in order to have a hope of recovering lost track position. The team’s initial explanation was that it didn’t expect all the other competitors to pit.

Stella alluded to his time as a junior engineer at Ferrari during the Michael Schumacher era, when that team was just beginning to get into its stride as an effective fighting force after two decades of disarray and underperformance. Team principal Jean Todt and technical director Ross Brawn implemented a major change in the working culture during the late 1990s, seeking to eliminate the blame culture and internal factional warfare which had blighted its performance.

“Racing is tough, racing may give you tough lessons, but this is the history of champions,” he said.

“I worked with Michael Schumacher, we won several titles together. We all think about the titles now, but after Las Vegas [this season, where both McLarens were disqualified] I was thinking how much pain he had to go through, for instance, when Michael started his experience at Ferrari.

“This is just the history of Formula 1, this is the true nature of racing. We are disappointed but, if anything, as soon as we start the review, we will get even more determined to learn from our lessons.

“Adapt and be stronger as a team and make sure that this phenomenal, beautiful opportunity that we have to compete for the drivers’ championship – and be the ones that actually stop Verstappen’s dominance in this period of F1, we want to face it at the best of ourselves.

“I’m looking forward to the next race and I’m looking forward to seeing a strong reaction from our team.”

It would be easy to look at the outcome of the Qatar GP and conclude that the obvious decision was to have pitted when the safety car was deployed on lap seven while Nico Hulkenberg’s Sauber was recovered from the run-off area of Turn 1, where it had come to rest after a collision with Alpine’s Pierre Gasly. But this might be to fall into the trap of hindsight bias, the belief that a pattern of events was more predictable than they were.

Nevertheless McLaren has important questions to ask itself about the optics it deployed while weighing up the possible outcomes of the race. Other team bosses have confirmed that the potential effects of a safety car on lap seven figured prominently in their pre-race simulations, given the 25-lap cap placed on tyre use by Pirelli.

Lap-seven safety car was known possibility

Since the race was to last 57 laps, this was the threshold at which it would be possible to take advantage of the Safety Car to make a ‘cheap’ pitstop and only have to stop once more.

“We said before the race that the worst-case scenario is a safety car on lap seven,” said Ferrari’s Frederic Vasseur. “Because then you have 50 laps to do. 25 laps, it means that everybody will pit with the safety car. And you know that everybody will pit lap 32, to do 25 laps with the two new sets that we had.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Dom Gibbons / LAT Images via Getty Images

“And we had the safety car on lap seven. It was, as per plan, the worst-case scenario.”

So McLaren needs to establish why it chose not to follow a course of action which seemed optimal – or least sub-optimal – to everyone else. It is highly unlikely that the possibility of a safety car on lap seven was not discussed internally.

What, then, steered McLaren’s engineers towards such a degree of certainty other cars would also choose not to pit? This is the nub of the issue, because the difficulty of overtaking on this circuit influences all the strategic permutations – McLaren didn’t want to send Piastri and Norris back out into traffic and potentially spend 25 laps mired there.

As to whether the papaya rules had an influence on the decision – pitting both cars would have left Norris in a double stack and cost him places – Stella was unequivocal.

“Certainly for Lando there was the extra consideration, as you say, of losing additional time because of the double-stack pitstop,” he said. “So it was in the consideration, but it wasn’t the main reason not to stop both cars. We thought that traffic could have been a problem for both cars – and in reality that was not the right interpretation of the situation at the time that we should have had.”

Why didn’t McLaren respond to Verstappen’s stop?

Should the team have brought Norris in when Verstappen pitted ahead of him? There are those who say it could and should have done this, and that it chose not to because a stop would have benefitted Norris at Piastri’s expense, and this would have played badly both internally and externally.

But this is another example of cognitive bias at play – it assumes prior knowledge of the outcome. To believe that McLaren recognised this outcome at some point between Piastri passing the pitlane entry and Verstappen breaking for it, and decided that screwing both its drivers’ races was better than screwing just one of them, requires quite a feat of mental gymnastics.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

Fundamentally the review needs to assess the quality of the decision-making based on what was known at the time, not on knowledge of what happened afterwards. And this comes back to the question of what made McLaren so certain it would not be alone in pitting in those circumstances.

“I think in terms of the misjudgement is something that we will have to review discussing internally,” said Stella. “We’ll have to assess some factors, like for instance whether there was a certain bias in the way we were thinking that led us as a group to think that not all cars necessarily would have pitted. There are sometimes some objective reasons, sometimes there may be some biases in the way you think.

“We will have to go through the review in a very thorough way, but what’s important is that we do it as usual in a way that is constructive, is analytical. I think already after Vegas we have had the possibility for me, and I was very proud of the team, to see how strong the no-blame culture is at McLaren, how much our culture is a culture of progress, is a culture of continuous improvements.”

We want to hear from you!

– The Autosport.com Team