A few weeks ago, Zak Brown and Andrea Stella sat down with Sky Sports F1 to talk about the complex dynamics of the three-way fight for the 2025 Formula 1 drivers' title, when two of those involved drivers are in McLarens. "I'd rather Max Verstappen win the title than favour Lando or Oscar," said Brown.
On a warm Qatar evening, after Verstappen took his seventh grand prix victory of the season through a McLaren pitwall decision to leave race-leading Oscar Piastri and third-place Lando Norris out as everyone else pitted - bringing the Red Bull driver 12 points short of Norris going into next weekend's Abu Dhabi season finale - Stella acknowledged the following:
"The misjudgement is something we will have to review internally. We'll have to assess for instance whether there was a certain bias in the way we were thinking that led us as a group to think that not necessarily all cars would have pitted. There can be some biases in the way that you think."
That bias in thinking clearly came from the determination not to favour one over the other that Brown had outlined a few weeks ago. Had they brought in both cars as the safety car came out for Nico Hulkenberg's crashed Sauber (in trying to pass Pierre Gasly's Alpine for ninth, they'd interlocked wheels at Turn 2), Piastri would have exited still comfortably leading but Norris, in having to be stacked behind the other McLaren, would have lost several seconds and perhaps as many as four places.
That policy of equality swerved the pitwall's collective thinking away from assessing the actual (low) likelihood of other cars not stopping and thereby making the McLarens vulnerable to traffic delays which Verstappen - who was running between the McLarens, around 2.5s adrift of Piastri and lapping slower - would have missed had he stayed out.
But Verstappen of course did not stay out and nor was he ever going to. Neither was anyone else. McLaren equality had let Verstappen in. He later joked that although he doesn't know what the papaya rules are, he really likes them. He heads into the finale 12 points down on Norris and four ahead of Piastri.
The McLarens could not pull out enough time on the pitted Verstappen in the 17/18 laps between his first stop and theirs. Although they reassumed the lead as Verstappen made his second stop on lap 32 (after the prescribed 25-lap tyre limit), they couldn't pull out anything like enough time to prevent Verstappen assuming a comfortable lead after they'd made their second stops. Piastri rejoined over 15s behind and was informed he would need to be over a second per lap faster than the Red Bull. "Wow, nice," he replied.
On hard tyres 10 laps newer, he pushed on but was no more than two to three tenths faster than a cruising Verstappen. Understandably deeply hacked off afterwards and clearly struggling not to let rip, Piastri said he was "lost for words" at how an easy victory - and a much stronger tilt at the title - had been lost.
It was worse for Norris, who exited the second stops in fifth, behind the closely spaced Carlos Sainz and Kimi Antonelli. The Mercedes had great traction and was running lighter on downforce so was super-fast at the end of the straights. Even with the benefit of DRS Norris could not pass it.
But just as Sainz was preparing to do his Singapore 2023 trick of giving the following car (Antonelli) his DRS to protect them both, Antonelli had a last-lap wobble under braking into Turn 10 and ran all four wheels off the track on the exit and only then did Norris grasp the extra couple of points for fourth place. But Sainz was safe in taking a superb second grand prix podium for Williams.
The McLaren debacle all went back to that fateful lap-seven decision to stay out. "The reason was we didn't want to end up in traffic after the pitstop," said Stella. "But obviously everyone pitted and made our staying out incorrect.
"Because Verstappen was fast and the tyre deg low, our decision was significantly penalised. Clearly Oscar was in control of the race and deserved to win it and we lost Lando the podium as well."
That the Hulkenberg incident should happen on lap seven was significant. Because that was the minimum number of laps you could do in the first stint if you were not to be forced onto a much slower three-stop - rather than the mandated two-stop minimum. With a tyre set limit of 25 laps and a 57-lap race, you could not stop before lap seven. That there should be the opportunity of stopping at the reduced time loss of a safety car within that window made it irresistibly the only realistic strategy. Irresistible to all but McLaren.
McLaren's pace advantage up to that point in the weekend perhaps played into that decision. But that pace advantage wasn't actually all that big - certainly less than the 0.25s of qualifying. In addition to that, the hard tyre Verstappen was on from his second stop on lap 32 and which the McLarens wouldn't switch to for another 10/12 laps was unexpectedly better than the medium.
Far from being able to use the pace advantage they'd had earlier in the weekend to overcome the time loss incurred by them not pitting under the safety car, their inferior tyre for Piastri's 10-lap overlap allowed Verstappen to simultaneously look after his fresh tyres and not have the McLarens get anywhere near far enough clear.
It could actually have gone even worse for McLaren had Fernando Alonso, running sixth in the Aston Martin, not done much of the second stint at a deliberately very slow pace, saving his tyres so as to do a late-stint sprint away from his followers to create the gap needed to remain ahead after stopping.
That opened up a big gap for the McLarens to drop into after their first stops. Had it not been for that, even Piastri would likely have lost further positions.
A later spin lost Alonso his sixth place to George Russell, who had been bundled down the pack on the first lap then been stacked behind Mercedes team-mate Antonelli in the pits. His pace in clear air was very strong and with just a slightly different sequence of events he could've been second. Isack Hadjar had been the first to pass the spinning Aston Martin but he suffered the dreaded puncture of the front left two laps from the end.
Charles Leclerc dragged the Ferrari to points, in eighth, ahead of Liam Lawson's Racing Bulls and Yuki Tsunoda's Red Bull.
"We stay in the fight to the end," said a delighted Verstappen. "When I saw them not pit, I thought, 'That's an interesting move'. It's all possible now. We'll see. I don't really worry about it too much."
"We didn't get it right," said Piastri through gritted teeth. "I left nothing out there. I think in hindsight it's pretty obvious what we'd have done. We'll discuss it. A little bit tough to swallow at the moment."
