Everything McLaren is afraid of as F1 title decider looms

“I’m a little disappointed,” said Lando Norris after falling 0.201 short of pole position for the Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix – a grid slot that would theoretically have enabled him to dictate the flow of a race in which he only has to finish third to clinch the world championship.

“We just weren’t quite quick enough today,” he added. “Given the higher fuel loads we were on this morning, we didn’t find as much time as we should have.”

As our analysis of the title contenders’ final qualifying laps shows, Max Verstappen not only landed crucial blows in the first two sectors, he maintained his advantage across the final sector, where McLaren’s MCL39 had been the stronger car up until that point. The brief tow he received from team-mate Yuki Tsunoda on the run to Turn 9 during his first flier ultimately proved irrelevant.

“There’s not much left – that’s pretty much as fast as it will go,” said Norris’ team-mate Oscar Piastri, who lines up third.

With the title contenders occupying the first three places on the grid, the championship picture is delicately poised – and there is no guarantee that the race will play out according to the pace order established in qualifying. So, there is much for McLaren to be concerned about, even though Norris has a 12-point advantage over Verstappen in the title race.

Turn 1 omnishambles

McLaren’s worst-case scenario is a catastrophic Turn 1 in which one or more of its drivers becomes too closely acquainted with another competitor – or each other. The Yas Marina track’s absence of overtaking opportunities adds to the likelihood of contact at the first corner as squabbles evolve for track position.

This possibility is magnified by the agendas at play within the leading group. Of the permutations that give Verstappen his fifth world championship, the most likely involves him winning, with Norris finishing fourth or lower. Anything else requires the McLaren drivers to finish much further down the order, or not score points at all.

Without wishing to trigger some of the more obnoxious elements of the fan community, this will require some subterfuge on Verstappen’s part – tactics of which he has proved himself well capable in the past.

From the best position on the grid, he has the skill and mental bandwidth to make the first corner much more challenging for Norris and Piastri – there’s no need for him to make the kind of desperate lunge for track position that characterised last year’s race here, where he already had the championship in the bag.

Equally, McLaren’s drivers have demonstrated a capacity to find each other on the opening lap, as in the US GP sprint race and the Singapore GP. In mitigation, both of these incidents involved third parties, but there are a wealth of these lining up immediately behind Norris and Piastri in Abu Dhabi.

In terms of pace, the Mercedes of George Russell in fourth and the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc in fifth cannot match the cars ahead. Granted, Russell topped the second segment of qualifying, but that was because the championship protagonists were running on used softs to save two fresh sets for Q3.

For Russell and Leclerc, gaining track position at the first corner would be a step towards a potential podium finish, something both of them covet.

George Russell, Mercedes

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

“I’m just going to treat it like any other race,” said Russell. “If there’s an opportunity and if there’s a gap… if this was race one of the season, I wouldn’t be aiming to do anything reckless, but I’m not going to leave opportunities on the table. I also want to finish on the podium.

“I also want to finish the season on a high and I’ve got to be honest, I won’t sleep better or worse no matter who wins the championship. So, I’ll be doing my own thing and go from there.”

2016 all over again

How else might Verstappen engineer the difficulties he needs the McLaren drivers to encounter? Another much-discussed scenario is a repeat of the tactics Lewis Hamilton employed in 2016 when he went into the Abu Dhabi championship-decider 12 points behind Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg – coincidentally the same margin by which Norris leads Verstappen.

Hamilton therefore also needed to win with Rosberg fourth or lower. He qualified on pole and led at the start – Rosberg was hyper-cautious into Turn 1 – then Hamilton did his utmost to back his team-mate into the chasing pack during the race.

Should Verstappen employ similar tactics, he won’t be fielding increasingly angst-ridden radio messages from the pitwall asking why he’s suddenly running up to two seconds off the absolute pace. But there are many other variables that mitigate against employing these tactics – which, you’ll recall, weren’t successful anyway.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W07 Hybrid, leads Nico Rosberg, Mercedes F1 W07 Hybrid

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

In 2016, Mercedes had a commanding pace advantage over the chasing pack, so Hamilton had less to lose by backing up the pack. That isn’t quite the case now. Also, the track has been changed, with a gently curved entry to the positive-camber Turn 9 replacing what was a fiddly set of stop-start corners.

Another factor in this scenario is the sensitivity of the Pirelli tyres, which are now much more resistant to thermal degradation than they were in 2016.

“It was also a different layout,” said Verstappen when asked if he would consider mirroring Hamilton’s 2016 strategy.

“I feel like now you get towed a lot more around the lap, so it’s probably not as easy to do something like that. Cars also are completely different to back then.

“I felt like it was a lot easier back then to back it up because the tyres would overheat a lot when you would get close. I remember even in 2016, in some qualifying laps, you couldn’t go flat out in Sector 1 to keep the tyres alive in the last sector.

“So, yeah, very different times. I hope it’s not straightforward, the race – but hopefully that’s not because of me…”

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Erik Junius

Strategic meltdown

There is yet another complicating factor: the range of potential strategies. Unlike many previous races this season, a one-stop is not quite nailed on.

That’s because Yas Marina is one of the lowest-grip tracks on the calendar, and the nature of the layout stresses the front and rear axles differently. The sheer number of traction events – either isolated in the stop-start sections, or combined with steering/braking in the flowing corners – puts the rear tyres at risk of thermal stress.

To protect the rears, teams dial more understeer into their setups, but at Yas this exacerbates the stress on the front-right tyre. Too much and the tread surface begins to tear up, initiating a graining phase, which magnifies the understeer. Trying to compensate for this by inducing rear-end slides to help turn the car adds to the thermal stress on the tyres: in effect, a doom loop.

The potential for front-right graining has been a talking point over the weekend, but the likely extent of it remains unclear – partly because so little running has been accomplished on the hard-compound tyres as some teams reserve those for the race, but largely because the track is evolving as more rubber is laid down by the supporting categories, two of which also run on Pirelli tyres.

Changing weather and track conditions can subtly alter the balance of performance, as in qualifying where a wing change combined with lower track temperature and a more evolved surface to enable Verstappen to find more pace where McLaren could not.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

More significantly, it adds to the unknowns when considering the strategic permutations ahead of the race. If it were to become a two-stop, either because of tyre degradation or an incident requiring a safety car deployment, that adds to the perils facing the McLaren pitwall – especially if Verstappen were to try to manage the pace of the race rather than breaking away.

Regardless of the review that happened during the week, the events of Qatar will have shaken McLaren’s confidence in the quality of its decision-making as a race evolves.

As Verstappen said about strategy, “You can talk about it for one hour, two hours, and then normally after one lap, you throw it in the bin.”

“Oscar, Lando is faster than you…”

Ahead of the championship finale, McLaren has girded itself for the potential necessity of asking Piastri to move over for his team-mate. It has said it will only do so if the circumstances at the time mean Piastri no longer has skin in the game for the drivers’ title.

This would be analogous to the 2007 season finale, where Ferrari stage-managed the final round of pitstops to enable Kimi Raikkonen to emerge in the lead ahead of team-mate Felipe Massa. A year later, Raikkonen repaid the favour to allow Massa to win, though the events of the final lap meant Massa lost the title by one point.

Any team orders scenario would naturally play badly in the public gallery, but McLaren will have to learn to live with this. As CEO Zak Brown has said more than once, his priority is to keep both drivers for the long term, which involves keeping Piastri happy.

For his part, Piastri is savvy enough not to explode the team’s internal dynamic, even if he or elements within his camp are leaning into the narrative that McLaren is favouring Norris. Better to be a good team player than to become an enemy within and be treated as such, as Alonso was in 2007.

Piastri is just two seasons into his F1 career and has already established himself as being quick enough to win the world championship. If he feels he isn’t being given the opportunities he deserves, he can wear another season of it while exploring his options elsewhere.

“I don’t know,” he said when asked what he would expect from Norris if he helped him to win the title. “Handshake would be good, probably. I don’t know. I haven’t… I don’t know what exactly is expected of me yet.

“But until either Lando or Max cross the line in front of me, I’ve still got a chance of winning the title. So yeah, we’ll see how the race pans out.”

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– The Autosport.com Team