McLaren’s messy management of the Hungarian Grand Prix is one of the big talking points to come out of Sunday’s race.
At the start, Oscar Piastri got a slightly better launch and took the lead from Lando Norris into turn 1. From there, he was controlling the race by 4s, although he did have a hairy moment at turn 11 on lap 33 that cost him 2 seconds.
Things got complicated from lap 45 onwards.
McLaren boxed the Brit first to cover Lewis Hamilton. Two tours later, Piastri was in from the lead.
Norris got the jump with the undercut. He built up a 6-second lead before eventually handing it back to his Australian teammate with three laps remaining as Piastri took his first Grand Prix win.
Christian Horner, Toto Wolff and Fred Vasseur all got asked about it in their various media sessions.
The Red Bull boss was surprised at how they complicated things.
“They didn’t need to make life that complicated for themselves, they were in a pretty comfortable situation.
“They chose to pit Lando two laps early, which in usual practice, unless you want your tail car ahead, is to pit the lead car first.
“Then they gave themselves a lot of work to do to reset that at the back end of the race.
“Obviously that’s their business, but they perhaps didn’t need to create that problem.”
Horner has been through this before with Webber and Vettel, Ricciardo and Verstappen, plus Pérez and Verstappen.
“The drivers’ interest versus the team’s interest. There’s always a conflict.”
While he was understandably focusing on the races of his drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur admitted it looked a bit harsh on Piastri.
“First, during the race I’m not focused on the McLaren, I’m focused on my car.
“And I don’t know why they did the undercut with Norris on Piastri, perhaps they had good reasons with the other cars around, I don’t want to make any comment on this.
“But then for sure I can perfectly understand that for Piastri it’s a bit harsh, he’s leading the race, he’s doing a good job, and your teammate is doing the undercut on you, it’s a bit harsh.
“Now perhaps it was for good reasons.”
Toto Wolff went more in-depth. After joining Mercedes in 2013 to take the role of team principal and became their F1 CEO, the Austrian had to manage the incredible rivalry of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg from 2014-2016 as they battled for championships with Mercedes totally dominant.
McLaren last fought for a championship in 2012 and has naturally seen a massive shift in senior staff since then.
Wolff believes they will learn from this as they get used to managing two drivers capable of fighting for victory each weekend, as well as creating a rules of engagement document like current Williams team principal James Vowles did at Mercedes 10 years ago.
“I think you can only manage situations when you eventually run into it and you find yourself exposed. That’s the first time that it happened to them.
“We only learn from our experiences, how are we managing a situation where two drivers can win in the same team, and you like to collect the points without giving up a driver championship.
“I’m sure they’re going to sit down and come up with what we came up with back in the day, the first rules of engagement. We didn’t want to call it rules anymore. We said racing intent. I’m sure there’s going to be the paper soon that’s going to come out.
“I have no doubt that Andrea and Zak have very strong leadership. It’s about defining that framework, what’s happening in each of those possible situations.”
At the same venue seven years ago, as Toto Wolff cited, Lewis Hamilton gave back P3 back to teammate Valtteri Bottas out of the final corner on the last lap, giving away three points to championship leader Sebastian Vettel. The Brit ultimately went on to comfortably take the title.
He asked for an opportunity to attack Kimi Räikkönen for P2 and promised to give the place back to Bottas if he couldn’t make the move. Despite his best efforts for 24 laps, the now seven-time World Champion failed to do so.
Ultimately his team play that day with Bottas in Hungary was very helpful for future races, such as Russia in 2018.
“Remember here in Hungary we had the same situation with Lewis and Valtteri. It’s almost similar. We asked him [to] invert the cars.
“We promised to Valtteri that if Lewis couldn’t overtake Kimi, that we would revert back. We did it. We stood to our values. Although Lewis at that stage was ahead in the championship, we did it.
“This is what McLaren decided to do today, to do the right thing. Stay by what they said.
“Now they are going to discuss with the two drivers together what we want to do going forward, because there is no discrepancy.”
