The first 18 laps of the Miami Grand Prix were terrific as we watched first one, then the other, McLaren driver work out how to get by Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, with lots of audacious attacks and uncompromising defences.
Oscar Piastri was the first to get by, but it took 14 laps to do it. Lando Norris – delayed getting back ahead of the cars who’d passed him at Turn 2 on the opening lap – took another four laps after Piastri to finally get that job done.
But the significant thing was that despite all that dicing, the McLarens still had way more energy in their tyres than anyone else, lapping sometimes over a second faster than the competition as they ran away and hid, Piastri always ahead. This was the most dominant McLaren performance of the season to date and it’s probably not a coincidence that it was on the hottest track temperature of the year.
The Verstappen/Norris moment at Turn 2 wasn’t a clear-cut foul, as Verstappen was clearly trying to correct a sliding moment which took him out wide over the kerb, and no penalty was even considered. But there is always scope to exaggerate such a slide and to allow it to take up more track space than might be necessary.
Is that what happened? Only Verstappen can know that, but Norris clearly felt aggrieved at having to take to the run-off, even long after the race had ended. “Without that I’m in the wall – hard,” he said. When Verstappen’s explanation was put to him, he replied: “What else is he [Max] going to say?”
Without that, Norris was the likely winner of the race, of course, courtesy of having outqualified Piastri the day before. As it was, the incident opened up Piastri’s day and he was not about to let such an opportunity slip away.
Alex Albon, feeling his race wasn’t with a McLaren, allowed Norris past without much resistance. Norris's move on George Russell between Turns 4 and 5 was highly unusual and just underscored how much more grip the McLaren had. Kimi Antonelli didn’t fight it either, also looking after his tyres by lap nine. By which time the Verstappen/Piastri dice was 4s up the road from Norris.
Piastri was his usual icy calm self in solving the high-speed puzzle of how to overtake Verstappen. Norris’s delay in repassing Albon’s Williams and the two Mercedes’ just took any edge of pressure away from Piastri, making the task more straightforward. “I could tell we had a lot of pace from the get-go,” he said, “and that it was going to be a matter of when, not if, we got past. So I wanted to do that as efficiently as possible.”
After several laps of 200mph side-by-side chess moves and counter-moves, Piastri finally nailed it by using DRS to get alongside the Red Bull into Turn 1, crowding Verstappen to the inside and daring him to brake late. As Max did so, so the smoke poured off the inside front, the Red Bull ran wide and Piastri simply slipped around the back. Never to be seen by Verstappen again.
Knowing surely that his team-mate was also going to be able to get by, Piastri made a break for it once he got the lead, pushed as hard as he dared and hoped it would take Norris a few more laps. By the time Norris got by – as Verstappen initially fought fiercely then virtually surrendered, so much slower were his tyres by then – Piastri had pulled out over eight seconds.
It was as well he did because into the second stint, after swapping the mediums for hards, Piastri was not as happy with the balance. Norris was significantly faster on the hard tyre and got the gap down to under four seconds. Only some of that was Piastri being cool.
“That wasn’t my best weekend,” reflected the runaway winner Piastri after a super race, “and most of that was yesterday. The likelihood of winning from fourth is pretty low. So I have a few things to work on.” Norris, sitting alongside, was doubtless inwardly grimacing.
The fight further back
A virtual safety car for Ollie Bearman's broken down Haas just after Verstappen and Antonelli had stopped allowed the McLarens to pull out an extra 10s on the Red Bull by pitting as the pack was slowed. That VSC also put Russell – who’d started on the hards – ahead of both Antonelli and Verstappen and now on the initially faster medium.
In race pace, there was very little in it between the Mercedes and Red Bull and Max could never quite get close enough to concern Russell, who was in the end a half-minute-behind distant third.
The Williams and Ferraris were very evenly matched – to each other and between their team-mates. In fact Alex Albon – once he’d finally got the upper hand in a long-running dice with team-mate Carlos Sainz - was pushing Russell’s Mercedes hard and went for the undercut on lap 26, just before the VSC got Russell off that hook. Albon then pressured Antonelli into a lock-up into Turn 1. A worryingly climbing water pressure stabilised once he got into clean air. Fifth place was the reward, just 8.5s behind Verstappen.
Sainz was left to battle with the Ferraris, with Charles Leclerc jumping him at the VSC, Sainz getting back ahead, before then locking up at Turn 1 and losing places to both Ferraris. Lewis Hamilton had started on the hards and now on the mediums felt he was faster than Leclerc and had a chance of catching Antonelli. His request to be waved through was initially denied, the team feeling his pace advantage was just from the 0.6s benefit of DRS. By the time Leclerc was given the order Hamilton had lost the best of his tyres – with Leclerc now complaining he was being held up by Hamilton!
When it became clear they were not catching Antonelli at a fast enough rate, the positions were swopped back again, leaving Leclerc and Hamilton seventh and eighth. It wasn’t the most efficient way of going racing.
