Sky Sports F1's Martin Brundle reviews a controversial Hungarian GP weekend as Oscar Piastri won his maiden Grand Prix from McLaren team-mate Lando Norris; watch every session from the Belgian GP live on Sky Sports F1, starting with first practice on Friday at 12.30pm
Wednesday 24 July 2024 21:49, UK
Another cracking 2024 Formula 1 race, the seventh winner this season, and more controversy. Excellent.
On a typically steaming hot Budapest weekend tyres would suffer and tempers would flare. Ironically it was rain which defined qualifying, and although precipitation was visible in the air and the pitlane looked soaked, the hitherto warm track seemed immune and dried almost instantly to generate some fast lap times.
Through it all emerged the two McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to lock out the front row, fractions ahead of Max Verstappen in third who banged his steering wheel in frustration.
The fast-drying track caught out the Alpine team in Q1, and a late red flag after Yuki Tsunoda's sizeable shunt meant that others like Fernando Alonso were sent straight to parc ferme not realising the final two and a quarter minutes remaining of Q3 would still take place.
Mercedes didn't fuel George Russell for enough laps on a drying track, and Sergio Perez slammed the barriers again to place them both virtually at the back of the grid. Mercedes and Ferrari were lacking some ultimate pace, and Aston Martin were running a little stronger but not enough to bother the top four teams. The scene was set for 70 scorching laps on Sunday.
It's a reasonable run from the starting grid to the downhill braking zone of the first corner and Norris, Piastri and Verstappen arrived side by side. On the inside Piastri had done well firstly to hold position on the right as Norris endeavoured to intimidate him, and secondly not to make contact with his squeezed team-mate to take the lead.
On the outside and running out of space, Verstappen hit the throttle and took off like a rocket ship through the run-off zone to take second place from Norris, which inevitably he had to give back, even by Red Bull's estimation. This was the beginning of a tirade of angry messages from Max that would define his race.
Hanging onto the lead trio was Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes, and his soon-to-be team-mate Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari. After a poor start, Carlos Sainz in the second Ferrari was destined to be a distant observer.
Piastri looked calm and fast at the front and built a three-second lead. Norris' pit wall curiously told him the main fight was with Verstappen behind him. There'd been a scare on the grid when McLaren had to do urgent work on Norris' throttle, but we heard no more about that.
Hamilton would pit on lap 16, followed by Norris on lap 17, and the leader Piastri on lap 18. Verstappen wouldn't be called in until lap 21, and while Lewis thought his was too early, Max furiously thought his team called him in much too late because he lost track position to Hamilton.
Cue much angst and beeping required for Max's radio calls as he berated his long-suffering engineer and friend Gianpiero Lambiase, and the team who've given him every one of his race victories and three, probably soon-to-be four, world championships.
I always say that you can't cherry-pick the bits you like about world-class sports people, they come as a package which adds up to their success. I'm such a fan of Max as a driver and a person, in awe of his talent, but I wish he didn't treat the team like that. His legacy should be more sporting, but we now know the two words, consisting of only seven letters, he would reply to that statement.
McLaren could pit Norris first to protect against Hamilton's early pit stop because Piastri had a decent lead and would not be undercut on fresh tyres. However, while building a lead again in the second phase Piastri had a nasty lap 33 where the back end of the car stepped out on the relatively fast right-hander of Turn 11 and he took a big trip across the dirty tarmac run-off area.
This, along with having to clean up his tyres and negotiate some back markers over the next few laps suddenly put his team-mate Norris just over a second behind, a key factor as to what would happen next.
Piastri recovered his composure, but the second scheduled pit stops were due. Normal procedure would be for the lead driver of the team at that moment to pit first, but McLaren wanted to cover off the hard-charging Hamilton who on lap 40 had received the second of his cleverly saved new hard compound tyres and was making haste.
They pitted second place Norris first on lap 45 for fresh medium tyres, and then Piastri on lap 47 for the same choice of tyres. Given Piastri's reduced advantage, it was inevitable that Norris would gain more than enough time in those two laps on fresh tyres to take the lead.
The team were relaxed, confident they would just swap the drivers around easily enough as they weren't threatened too much behind, especially given that Hamilton and Verstappen were soon to be battling.
Comfortably in the lead, Norris became reluctant to make this swap. He ignored radio calls to slow his pace to protect the tyres and to let Piastri through. Then he began to argue that he was fighting for a championship against Verstappen and so needed the extra points, already being 47 points ahead of Piastri on race morning.
Lando then suggested if Oscar could catch up, he'd let him through. The team radio calls became ever firmer and more impassioned but stopped short of team principal Andrea Stella having to intervene with a direct instruction. One of the core clauses in any F1 contract is that you will follow team instructions at all times, and this is a long-standing problem given that in F1 you are employed and drive as a team, but you race, score points, and are measured as an individual.
Like Lando I'm conflicted here. I managed a driver, at McLaren funnily enough, who was absolutely duped into handing over a race victory, not that this was the case on Sunday. I've also seen multiple champions who would have won the race and then handled the nuclear fallout afterwards, and who would have been secretly admired for that killer instinct in many quarters. The compliant team player on one of Lando's shoulders won out over the selfish, competitive demon on his other.
But McLaren has risen to be the team to beat on the grid these past few races because they've had a very strong team ethic and a calm, professional and methodical approach under the increasingly impressive Stella. They have frequently swapped the two drivers around in the past couple of seasons, and as they said to Lando on the radio, you'll need all of us if you want to be champion.
I wonder what Oscar would have done if the roles had been reversed. His manager Mark Webber was on the receiving end of the infamous Red Bull Multi-21 team orders in Malaysia 2013 when Sebastian Vettel ignored pre-race agreements and in-race instructions.
What Lando should have done is let Oscar through immediately when requested, and then given himself the maximum opportunity to overtake, if he could, to take victory that way.
Hamilton drove a cracking race to finish third and claim his 200th F1 podium in a Mercedes which looked quite a handful. He has a different playbook when he's in close combat with Max, something as we all know he learned the hard way. He was pushing the limits of car placement, something Max was keen to point out. Eventually and somehow inevitably, on lap 63, as they both lapped Alex Albon's Williams, a frustrated Max saw his opportunity and lunged Lewis, who had begun his turn into the corner.
The resultant contact launched Max into the air but remarkably both cars were still race-worthy. Max had locked up under such late braking and lost some control, and the stewards also stated that Lewis could have made more room, but it was all put down to a racing incident with no penalties for either driver.
It would cost Max fourth place to the relentless Leclerc in a Ferrari generating an impressive effort on hard tyres.
Perez recovered to seventh place and Russell to eighth which was the best they could reasonably hope for from their lowly grid positions on a track where overtaking is particularly difficult. Remarkably, McLaren are now only 51 points behind Red Bull in the constructors' championship, and Ferrari 67 behind, which is not so many considering both team cars can score points every weekend.
Piastri has been threatening to win a main GP race for some time now and continues his run of scoring points in all 13 races so far this season. I'm sure he'd have liked to win without a couple of errors and the shenanigans with the driver change around, but at 23 years old he's the first F1 race winner born in the 21st century, and with such a calm head, he has a very bright future indeed.
The action continues this weekend with the final race before F1's summer break, the Belgian Grand Prix. You can watch every session from Spa-Francorchamps live on Sky Sports F1. Stream every F1 race and more with a NOW Sports Month Membership - No contract, cancel anytime
