MCLAREN DRIVERS HUNGER FOR THE WIN IN HUNGARY

The 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix should have been a celebration for McLaren and a memory to savour for Australia’s Oscar Piastri.

Instead it became one of frustration and none-too-gentle persuasion after a team decision brought a conflict between their drivers and the team which may have incriminations for the future.

Norris and Piastri shared the front row as the race began. Norris moved to his right to cut off his teammate’s run towards Turn 1. In doing so he opened the door for Verstappen to challenge on his left.

The #4 became squeezed in the middle and ran towards the outside of the circuit. That sent Verstappen off-track and Piastri into the lead.

Verstappen rejoined ahead of Norris which began a series of radio messages that did not sit well with the Dutch driver. Told to give the position back to Norris, Verstappen protested that it should wait until the stewards intervened, though the Oracle Red Bull Team though otherwise.

That set Verstappen on a rather unhappy journey for the remainder of the race. It was suggested by the Sky Sports commentators that Max’s demeanour may have been affected by a late nigh sim race as he argued with his engineer throughout the race. A late race battle for third with Lewis Hamilton nearly ended in disaster after Verstappen locked up heavily, touched the right front of Hamilton’s Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 and launched into the air.

Verstappen thudded back to the ground with a bone jarring thud, but somehow continued to the finish in fifth place.

Oscar Piastri had controlled the first portion of the race superbly. He etched out to a four-second lead over Verstappen and then Norris and maintained his tyres to near-perfection.

He remained in a strong lead after the first round of stops and a switch to the hard tyres, until lapped traffic came into play.

The Hungaroring is notorious for rubber build up off the racing line and can affect tyre performance quite severely if a driver gets off-line to pass. That is what was surmised had happened to Piastri when he came across lapped traffic. In the space of just a few laps his lead over Norris was slashed from three to one-and-a-half-seconds.

Hamilton had moved to within an undercut range on Norris and the McLaren team responded by giving Norris priority for the next pit stop.

Piastri was told by the team that the move was to protect Norris from Hamilton and not to undercut for the race lead. He was assured that his place would be protected.

When Piastri stopped a lap later, Norris had taken the effective race lead. Piastri then ran wide on cold tyres as Norris forged ahead to a similar lead that the Australian had previously held.

It was then that the emotions, caught in the heat of the battle, came to the fore.

The next portion of the race was characterised by a series of communications between the McLaren engineer and Norris. The team wanted Norris to cede the lead back to Piastri. Norris first told the team that he was the one in the best position to challenge Verstappen for the world championship.

There was then a change of tact with the team’s engineers issuing concerns of Norris over-using the tyres at specific corners, asking him to steady up his lap times.

They then appealed to him about team unity and the need for McLaren to work together.

Norris replied by telling Piastri to catch him.

Piastri amazingly stayed quiet, bar one communication as the laps counted down.

Norris eventually slowed and allowed Piastri to retake the lead.

Piastri then won the race from Norris and Hamilton.

It left one to wonder how either driver would react to the post-race interview and podium presentations. Who would be celebrating and would the victory champagne leave a bitter taste?

Having gone through the cool-down lap, those emotions began to subside.

Norris graciously approached Piastri and shook hands as the Australian was about to climb out of his car.

McLaren were still left to scratch their heads and pick through the pieces of another tactical decision that had the potential to go horribly wrong.

They weren’t alone in that regard.

Visa Cash App RB pitted Daniel Ricciardo early, when he was leading Yuki Tsunoda in eleventh place when he was sent to the pits early for hard tyres. Tsunoda stayed out until Lap 30 by which time he had found himself in eighth place.

Ricciardo and Tsunoda had lost positions in the early laps as the Haas cars started on soft tyres as did Alex Albon. The pair were then unable to make headway as those soft tyre runners lost grip.

Ricciardo spent the rest of the Grand Prix stuck in a battle with Albon, Alonso, Stroll and Hulkenberg. The Australian finished twelfth, with the Aston Martins between him and Tsunoda in ninth.

Leclerc finished fourth from Verstappen, Sainz, Perez, Russell, Tsunoda and Stroll.

“Yup, thank you everyone,” Piastri radioed back to the team when congratulated on the victory. Thank you very much for the co-ordination.Yeah, Sorry I made it a little more painful than it needed to be.Thank you, well done maximum points.”

“Really good weekend, first F1 win. Thank you everyone.”

“An amazing day for us as a team, I think that’s the main thing,” Norris said in the podium interview.

“A long way clear of the rest, so I think that we did it in style.”

“A good run by the team and of course Oscar. He got a good start and got me off the line, then controlled the race well. So, yeah, it was coming at some point and he deserved it today.”

“Very, very special,” was how Piastri described his first win during the podium interview.

“This is really the day I dreamed of as a kid, standing on the top step of an F1 podium.”

“Yeah, obviously a bit complicated at the end, but I put myself in the right position at the start and thank you to the team for an amazing effort and an amazing car.”

“It’s a hell of a lot of fun racing with McLaren, so I can’t thank them enough, for giving me the chance to be in Formula One and winning together eighteen months in is an incredible feeling.”

“The longer you leave it the more you get a bit nervous,” a rather coy Piastri answered when asked about the position swap issue during the closing stages of the race.

“It was well executed by the team and I think it was the right decision. I put myself in the right position at the start. With the different strategy we had my pace wasn’t as quick as I would have liked in the last stint, but I was still in the right position to make it happen.”

“I think that I still have some things to work on and I’ll enjoy the win when I can.”

Photos: F1 & McLaren FB

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