Oscar Piastri has been left feeling “pretty c**p” as McLaren sifts through the rubble of its disastrous Qatar Grand Prix, in which a strategy blunder handed the race to Max Verstappen, keeping his title hopes alive.
Verstappen pitted under an early safety car while McLaren kept both drivers out in a decision that had dire ramifications at the chequered flag.
Red Bull’s call took Verstappen to a race win and saw him surpass Piastri in the title standings, and close the gap to leader Norris to just 12 points with only one race remaining.
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WHAT THE DRIVERS SAID
Piastri, who twice qualified on pole in Qatar and won the sprint race, was left devastated by the result that leaves him with only a distant shot at winning the title this weekend.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone but I feel pretty c**p as you can imagine. I don’t know what to say,” he told Sky Sports.
“We didn’t get it right with the strategy. The pace was very strong. I didn’t put a foot wrong. Just a shame.
“I left it (whether to pit) in the team’s hands to decide what the best strategy was. They had more information than I do. But, yeah…”
Both Piastri and Norris made it clear during the race over team radio that they felt McLaren had made a mistake by opting to not pit either of them.
Piastri said he was “speechless”, while Norris said at the time of the safety car: “We should have just followed him (Verstappen) in, no? If we knew the car ahead was staying out.”
The decision gave rise to the theory that McLaren was frozen into inaction by its ‘Papaya Rules’, afraid of appearing to favour one driver over the other in a double stack, or in the event that the safety car only lasted long enough to pit one driver.
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That question was after the race put to both drivers, who did their best to squash the speculation.
“I’m not sure today’s decision was to do with that. We potentially just got it wrong. I will speak to the team,” Piastri said.
However, the line of questioning sparked a more fiery response from Norris during a tense TV interview.
Visibly irked by the suggestion, Norris said: “It’s nothing to do with that. Everyone keeps thinking that, but it’s got nothing to do with that. We’re free to race.
“Red Bull were just as quick today as they were yesterday. They did a better job as a team and made the right call. That’s it.
“We’ll review things, see what we could have done better. We already know – we didn’t make the right decision.
“You can’t get them all right, you know.
“They do their job. I do my job. If we do that we’ll be fine.”
Norris otherwise was eager to support his team.
He conceded that the wrong decision was made, but was eager to stress that on the weight of the season, McLaren had made plenty of correct calls.
“It’s the wrong decision and we shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “Oscar lost the win and I lost P2. We didn’t do a good job today, but we’ve done plenty of good jobs in other races and we won the constructors’ seven or six races ago because of that.
“Not our finest day, but that’s life.”
Piastri said he will remain a “happy man” as long as he can still “dominate” next weekend in Abu Dhabi.
He goes into the race 16 points behind Norris, and four behind Verstappen.
WHAT THE TEAM SAID
Sky Sports’ Ted Kravitz noted after the race that McLaren appeared “shell-shocked” with neither team principal Andrea Stella or boss Zak Brown appearing to provide their first reaction.
Both did, however, emerge after the podium to face the music.
Stella said Piastri “deserved” to win the race and that Norris could’ve taken a podium spot if they hadn’t made the wrong call.
“Definitely not the outcome we wanted. Something we will review with the decision we made when there was the Safety Car on Lap 7,” he said.
Stella said that the team didn’t expect “everyone else to pit” which made their decision the wrong call.
“Once everyone pitted, it makes that the right thing to do. When you have the lead car, you don’t know what the others are going to do,” he said.
“There could have been a loss for Lando if we pitted both cars with the double stack, but, effectively, the main reason was not expecting everyone else to pit.
“It was a decision. As a matter of fact it wasn’t the correct decision.”
Meanwhile, Brown said the team felt “terrible” and owned up to the blunder.
“We made the wrong decision, feel terrible for Oscar and Lando, Oscar was absolutely impeccable all weekend so we let them down,” Brown said.
“You win and lose as a team, but definitely not a great moment. Our evaluation… was clearly incorrect so we’ll go back and study that, nothing we can do about it now.
“We’re leading the championship, put Oscar at a deficit and left some points on the table, so we’ll just do what we can in Abu Dhabi, we were very strong there last year.”
The moment Brown found Piastri in the TV pen and gave him a hug, which was only awkwardly reciprocated, was going viral after the race.
Asked what Brown said to him, Piastri said it was an apology, adding: “I can’t ask for more than that.”
WHAT EXPERTS ARE SAYING
Former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports Germany analyst Ralf Schumacher didn’t hold back in his assessment.
He delivering a scathing take for McLaren in the aftermath, saying that their decision was impossible to understand.
“I honestly don’t understand it at all, because the lead driver gets priority – he’s the faster one. In this case, that was Piastri,” he told Sky Sports Germany.
“You absolutely bring him in. That way you’ve covered both options.
“It’s the ABC of motor racing. You don’t need a PhD to figure that out. That’s why I really don’t get it.”
Speculating on how such a basic call was missed, Schumacher suggested “something went wrong in the chain of command.”
He added: ““There has to be one person who takes responsibility. And I suspect – I don’t want to say it too loudly – but there’s someone there who’s extremely ambitious. And in a situation like that, you have to trust the person making the call. If you try to make the call yourself, it’s already over.”
Former Aston Martin head of strategy and Sky Sports pundit Bernie Collins said that McLaren was guilty of not giving appropriate consideration to the safety car situation.
“We were all here thinking if there’s a Safety Car on Lap 7, you have two nice 25-lap stints to the end. When they looked at that permutation they thought the majority of the field would not take that and they would still be on the strategy amongst others,” she said.
“They should have looked at ‘what if everybody did something different to them?’
“Piastri had a three-second gap to Verstappen. With that advantage, I don’t understand for Oscar Piastri, if it was a stand-alone car, why you wouldn’t pit.
“For Lando Norris, it’s a little more difficult. He has to stack with his teammate, open a gap, how many positions will he lose?”
Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle said he didn’t believe Papaya Rules was to blame for the error, but rather that McLaren simply “read it wrong”
He said that McLaren sought flexibility while incorrectly thinking that teams wouldn’t double stack their drivers in the pits.
“They misunderstood it all and got it wrong,” he said. “It would have hurt Lando Norris stacking. Who knows whether they could have fed them out?
“I don’t think that was on their mind. I think they thought they were doing the right thing strategically for the race to keep that flexibility later on.
“But the tyres didn’t fall apart and Max Verstappen was plenty fast enough.”
Brundle conducted post race interviews and said that, from his observation, Piastri appeared distraught.
“I was trying to get some words out of Oscar after the race. He was broken, because he’s dominated this weekend,” he said.
