‘Qatar GP shows anything can happen in three-way title showdown’

After Red Bull’s Max Verstappen won a dramatic Qatar Grand Prix thanks to a significant McLaren strategy error, Formula 1 will face its first final-race championship showdown between more than two drivers in 15 years.

Lando Norris, a McLaren driver, said it was “of course not our greatest day,” which is understated given how poorly his team managed to salvage a victory for the Briton.

Norris ‘ championship lead has been cut by Verstappen to 12 points heading to Abu Dhabi next weekend, with the other McLaren driver, Oscar Piastri, a further four points behind.

After the race, Piastri was left speechless as he digested the fact that Verstappen had won the race while his championship position had changed to third.

The Australian claimed that it was “pretty painful.”

Norris is still the favourite to win the title – the points margin means that he just needs to finish third to win the championship in Abu Dhabi on Sunday even if Verstappen wins the race.

Qatar, however, demonstrates that anything can happen.

And it’s worthwhile to recall the last time there were so many drivers in contention for the final race.

In 2010, Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso headed to Abu Dhabi with leads of eight and 15 points over Red Bull’s Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel.

It was a second painful weekend in succession for McLaren, after they lost second and fourth places for Norris and Piastri with a double disqualification in Las Vegas.

Verstappen was compared to the villain in a horror film that just keeps coming back to life before the Qatar race weekend by McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown.

Ironically, Lusail housed McLaren’s own horror film.

They handed Verstappen a win that will only increase the pressure on their drivers at a final race weekend which is a mouth-watering prospect for neutrals, and a nerve-wracking one for Norris and McLaren.

The obvious choice was to pit for fresh tyres when the safety car arrived on lap seven following a collision between Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg. Every other team did it because it was so obvious.

The reason it was such a slam-dunk decision – for everyone bar McLaren – was that tyre supplier Pirelli had mandated a 25-lap maximum for any set of tyres because of the risk of failures around the demanding corners and sharp kerbs of the Qatar track.

When exactly 50 laps were remaining, the safety car arrived. So anyone who stopped at the time had two 25-lap stints.

Given that stopping under a safety car saves nine seconds of race time over a pit stop under green-flag conditions, and that this would have been a one-stop race had it not been for Pirelli’s prescriptions, a pit stop was a no-brainer.

Verstappen immediately clocked it.

When they called me in, he said, “I had to look and remember that we were entering lap seven.” “So I was, like, OK, now we can go to the end (with one more stop).

When Norris and his engineer, Will Joseph, were finished speaking, they immediately exchanged the same query. Norris wanted to know, if he was racing Piastri, why they did not stop when his team-mate stayed out?

Later in the race, Joseph responded that it eliminated their strategic flexibility.

The issue was that they would unavoidably lose track position around a track where overtaking was all but impossible. They were going to emerge from their final pit stops with at least one car, and probably both, behind Verstappen.

Andrea Stella, the team’s manager, claimed that the team had not pitted because they worried that others would decide to stay away.

At a track where overtaking was all but impossible, McLaren would have conceded a leading track position.

The problem with that reasoning was that, as the race proved, anyone who stayed out was ultimately going to lose that position to someone who had stopped. Therefore, it made no sense to stay out.

McLaren did not attempt to defend the call. And Stella was his usual calm, reasoned self.

He said, “We’ll have to consider some factors.” For instance, whether there was a certain bias in our thinking that led us as a group to believe that not all cars would have pitted against one another.

Rivals tried to be completely fair to both drivers, but they also saw something else might be happening based on how McLaren have handled things this season.

To win the race, they had to stop under the safety car. In that circumstance, Piastri would undoubtedly stop because he had a top priority as the leader.

It was more complicated, however, for Norris. If he stopped at the same time, McLaren would have had to do a so-called “double-stack” stop, when they service one car and then the other.

However, doing that adds an additional five seconds to the car’s second.

Verstappen was already in second place at the beginning, Norris had already fallen behind. But this would have meant he would also have dropped behind the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli – who was less than two seconds behind Norris at the time – and probably also Williams ‘ Carlos Sainz, who was 3.5secs adrift of the McLaren.

Stella insisted that the main reason for stopping both cars wasn’t the fact that it was an “extra consideration.”

Some in the pit lane discovered a plot here. The belief among a decent number of F1 insiders is that McLaren are favouring Norris this year, but not wanting to admit it publicly.

This theory is based on races like Hungary, where Norris was given the option to run an alternative strategy after a poor first lap, which led to him finishing fifth and ultimately defeating Piastri, who spent the majority of the race ahead of him.

And then Italy, where a pit-stop issue caused Norris to fall behind Piastri after the team flipped the natural pit-stop order for controversical reasons, and McLaren gave Piastri the order to place him back.

For F1 as a sport, if not for McLaren, this was pretty much the perfect outcome.

This is the first title-deciding contest between two drivers since 2010. The excitement will match the intense pressure.

Norris was keen to play it all down on Sunday when asked how he would approach the final race and what could be his first F1 championship title.

He said, “It’s the same as every weekend.” They try to beat me, and I try to beat them. It’s nothing different. I simply want to go to bed.

After a successful weekend that had resulted in him losing what had at the end of August appeared to be a 34-point lead, Piastri was trying to put his disappointment at losing a win in perspective.

“It’s certainly not a catastrophe”, he said. We chose the wrong course today. That is unmistakable, but the world hasn’t ended.

” So, obviously, it hurts at the moment, but with time things will get better. There have been many challenging situations, both this year and during the previous seasons, and I believe you have always learned to overcome them.

“But how you handle it all depends. So I’m sure we’ll get through it. But it does hurt, of course, at the moment.

Verstappen is simply reveling in having the opportunity to win a title that he has spent the majority of his year believing is beyond his reach while pursuing a fifth consecutive crown.

“I know that I’m 12 points down”, he said. “I enter there with only positive energy,” I say. I make every effort possible.

” But at the same time, if I don’t win it, I still know that I had an amazing season. It’s therefore not really important. It relieves a lot of the pressure. I’m just out there having a good time like I had today. “

The hand-wringing will take place at McLaren, which is where it will take place. Their boss is aware of the situation.

Stella has been here before. He cited two instances where a driver who came in third in this sort of a situation ended up winning. He participated in both.

In 2007, Stella was race engineer to Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari when the Finn overhauled a massive points gap in the final two races to beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Alonso.

When Ferrari messed up in Abu Dhabi in 2010, he was working on Alonso.

Starting in 2002, Stella and Michael Schumacher began a five-game winning streak, but only after the German suffered painful losses in 1997, 1998, and 1999.

” Racing is tough, “Stella said”. Although racing may teach you difficult lessons, champions’ history dates back to this. Michael Schumacher and I collaborated. We won several titles together.

“We all think about the titles right now, but after Vegas, I was thinking about how much pain Michael had to go through before starting his Ferrari career.

“Formula 1’s history is only here.” This is the true nature of racing.

We are disappointed, but once we begin the review, we will become even more determined to adapt, learn from our mistakes, and work together more effectively.