Photo by Kym Illman/Getty Images
McLaren delivers a one-two at the Hungarian Grand Prix, but at what cost?
If you turned on the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday midway through the race and thought it was 2021 for a moment, you were likely not alone. As the laps ticked down at the Hungaroring Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were locked in a tight battle for position on the track, harkening back to one of the sport’s more memorable seasons.
But this is not 2021. It is 2024, and the story has changed. While Verstappen and Hamilton were battling on the track, their fight was for the final podium spot, and the McLarens of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris were simply running away from the field.
However, the eventual McLaren one-two perhaps raised more questions for the team.
After fumbling away a potential one-two at the British Grand Prix, leading to two weeks of questions regarding whether McLaren was ready to fight at the front, they seemed to answer those with a strong day on Saturday. McLaren began the day with the front row locked out after Norris claimed pole position and Piastri qualified second on Saturday. But it was the Australian driver who seized the lead off the start, building out a lead over Norris over the first two-thirds of the race.
But then McLaren faced a decision, and they brought Norris in first from second place for his final pit stop, keeping Piastri out two extra laps. The undercut vaulted Norris into first, but the team ordered Norris to eventually give the place back to Piastri. The Australian driver was instructed to close the gap to Norris, at which point his teammate would move aside to “reestablish the order.”
But, as David Coulthard asked on F1TV, “[w]hy would Lando Norris move with 15 laps to go?”
Over and over again, the team warned Norris that he was using the tires too much over the closing laps, which was simply another way of telling Norris to allow Piastri to catch him. “Turn 4, Turn 11,” was the message from the McLaren pit wall to Norris on where he needed to ease up to save the medium tires on his MCL38, but the underlying message was clear:
Ease up and let Piastri catch you.
“I think we’re getting on the cusp of unprofessional,” commented Coulthard on F1TV regarding the repeated messages, putting Norris at risk of being distracted when the message was clear.
At one point McLaren reminded Norris of the Sunday morning briefings and told Norris that he had made his point. Moments later race engineer Will Joseph even told Norris that he was trying to “protect” him.
Finally, Norris had a message of his own. “Yeah, well, tell him to catch up then please.”
But on Lap 68 Norris relented. He slid to the side, letting Piastri through, putting his teammate on a path to his first Grand Prix victory.
But at what cost?
“Sorry I made a swap a little more painful than it needed to be,” said Piastri after taking the checkered flag.
“You never know in this game how many opportunities you’re going to get,” said Coulthard after the race, after hearing McLaren remind Norris of the message from earlier in the day, that many more opportunities would be coming his way for a victory.
It was a moment that Coulthard had experienced himself as a driver, and as the laps ticked down he outlined how, if he had to do it all over again, he would not have moved to the side to let Mika Häkkinen capture a victory. (It should be noted here that having Coulthard in the commentary box for this race offered invaluable insight regarding the thinking at McLaren, as well as what was going through the minds of both Norris and Piastri down the stretch.)
“An amazing day for us as a team, I think that’s the main thing, honestly,” said Norris to Nico Rosberg trackside.
“The team asked me to do it, and I did it, that’s it,” said Norris to Rosberg about the team order. “We’ll keep pushing.”
“This is really the day I dreamed of as a kid,” said Piastri. “Obviously a bit complicated at the end … thank you to the team.”
Piastri also addressed the team orders.
“It was well executed by the team, I think it was the right thing,” added Piastri.
In an interview with The Independent earlier this week McLaren CEO Zak Brown had a one-word reason for the team’s stunning turnaround over the past calendar year.
Trust.
“The environment was pretty toxic, there wasn’t a lot of trust or belief. It was all really bad. When I started, people were guilty until proven innocent,” continued Brown. “It was damaging to the culture.”
Brown offered a lot of credit to McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella, who took over in that role in December 2022, ahead of the 2023 F1 season.
“Trust with each other,” added Brown. “There’s a big culture difference in not creating conspiracy theories out of nothing. Andrea has done an outstanding job in setting a clear direction and getting the team into a mindset of just doing incrementally better every day. Learning from mistakes, embracing mistakes, as opposed to blaming someone else.”
If we take a step back and look at the big picture, this was a huge day for McLaren. Taking a one-two in Hungary — while Red Bull was forced to settle for a P5 and a P7 — banked 43 points for McLaren. Not only is that enough for McLaren to overtake Ferrari for second in the F1 Constructors’ Championship, but with Red Bull settling for 16 points, McLaren pulled 27 points closer to the team at the front, the latest sign yet that a true title fight is upon us.
But there may be some repair work needed to ensure that trust is intact heading into the Belgian Grand Prix.
