Qatar GP shows anything can happen in three-way title showdown

Formula 1 is heading into its first final-race championship showdown between more than two drivers for 15 years after Red Bull's Max Verstappen won a dramatic Qatar Grand Prix thanks to a significant McLaren strategy error.

"Obviously not our greatest day," said McLaren driver Lando Norris, something of an understatement on a day on which his team threw away a win, albeit not for the Briton.

Norris' championship lead has been cut by Verstappen to 12 points heading to Abu Dhabi next weekend, with the other McLaren driver, Oscar Piastri, a further four points behind.

Piastri was left momentarily speechless after the race, as he digested the fact that a certain win had been turned into a second place to Verstappen, and his second place in the championship turned into third.

"It's pretty painful," the Australian said.

Norris is still the favourite to win the title - the points margin means that he just needs to finish third to win the championship in Abu Dhabi on Sunday even if Verstappen wins the race.

But if Qatar shows anything, it shows that anything can happen.

And it's worth casting one's mind back to the last time the final race had so many drivers in contention.

In 2010, Ferrari's Fernando Alonso headed to Abu Dhabi with leads of eight and 15 points over Red Bull's Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel.

Famously, in one of the most extraordinary championship climaxes in F1 history, Ferrari messed up their strategy and opened the door to Vettel to win his first title.

It was a second painful weekend in succession for McLaren, after they lost second and fourth places for Norris and Piastri with a double disqualification in Las Vegas.

Before the race weekend in Qatar, McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown had likened Verstappen to the villain in a horror movie who just keeps coming back alive.

Ironically, McLaren had their own horror movie at Lusail.

They handed Verstappen a win that will only increase the pressure on their drivers at a final race weekend which is a mouth-watering prospect for neutrals, and a nerve-wracking one for Norris and McLaren.

When the safety car came out on lap seven, following a crash between Sauber's Nico Hulkenberg and Alpine's Pierre Gasly, the obvious call was to pit for fresh tyres. So obvious, that every single other team did so.

The reason it was such a slam-dunk decision - for everyone bar McLaren - was that tyre supplier Pirelli had mandated a 25-lap maximum for any set of tyres because of the risk of failures around the demanding corners and sharp kerbs of the Qatar track.

The safety car came out when there were exactly 50 laps left. So, it left two 25-lap stints for anyone who stopped then.

Given that stopping under a safety car saves nine seconds of race time over a pit stop under green-flag conditions, and that this would have been a one-stop race had it not been for Pirelli's prescriptions, a pit stop was a no-brainer.

Verstappen clocked it immediately.

"When they called me in, I had to look and remember that we were going into lap seven," he said. "So I was, like, OK, now we can go to the end (with one more stop).

So then, yeah, I was a bit surprised when I came out of the pit. I was like, 'OK, I think this is a very good opportunity now for us to win the race.'

Norris asked the same question to his engineer Will Joseph as soon as they had not pitted. Norris wanted to know, if he was racing Piastri, why they did not stop when his team-mate stayed out?

Joseph replied that it robbed them of strategic variability, later in the race.

The problem was, it was also going to inevitably rob them of track position around a track where overtaking is all but impossible. They were going to emerge from their final pit stops with at least one car, and probably both, behind Verstappen.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said that the team had not pitted because they were concerned that others would decide to stay out.

That would have meant McLaren had given up a leading track position at a track where overtaking was all but impossible.

The problem with that reasoning was that, as the race proved, anyone who stayed out was ultimately going to lose that position to someone who had stopped. So staying out made no sense.

McLaren made no attempt to justify the call. And Stella was his usual calm, reasoned self.

"We'll have to assess some factors," he said. "Like, for instance, whether there was a certain bias in the way we were thinking that led us as a group to think that not all cars necessarily would have pitted.

We will have to go through the review in a very thorough way, but what's important is that we do it as usual, in a way that is constructive, is analytical.

Rivals sensed something else might be going on, something based on the way McLaren have operated this season, in trying to be absolutely fair to both drivers.

To win the race, they had to stop under the safety car. As the leader, Piastri had pit-stop priority, so in that scenario he would definitely stop.

But for Norris it was more complicated. If he stopped at the same time, McLaren would have had to do a so-called "double-stack" stop, when they service one car and then the other.

Doing that, though, costs the car that is second about an extra five seconds.

Norris was already behind Verstappen, having lost second place at the start. But this would have meant he would also have dropped behind the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli - who was less than two seconds behind Norris at the time - and probably also Williams' Carlos Sainz, who was 3.5secs adrift of the McLaren.

Stella admitted that this was an "extra consideration", but insisted: "It wasn't the main reason not to stop both cars."

Some in the pit lane sniffed a conspiracy here. The belief among a decent number of F1 insiders is that McLaren are favouring Norris this year, but not wanting to admit it publicly.

This theory is based on races such as Hungary, where Norris was allowed to operate an alternate strategy after a bad first lap dropped him to fifth, and ended up beating Piastri, who spent most of the race ahead of him.

And Italy, where a pit-stop problem dropped Norris behind Piastri after the team had inverted the natural pit-stop order for questionable reasons, and McLaren ordered Piastri to give Norris the place back.

Stella was not directly asked this question after the race in Qatar, but it's pretty clear what his answer would have been. This writer did an interview with Brown in Austin in October, in which he dismissed as "nonsense" any idea McLaren were favouring Norris, and reiterated the team's policy of fairness to both drivers.

For F1 as a sport, if not for McLaren, this was pretty much the perfect outcome.

This is the first title decider between more than two drivers since 2010. The pressure is intense, and the excitement will match it.

Norris was keen to play it all down on Sunday when asked how he would approach the final race and what could be his first F1 championship title.

It's the same as every weekend," he said. "I try and beat them, they try and beat me. It's nothing different. I just want to go to bed.

Piastri was trying to keep in perspective his disappointment at losing a win after a strong weekend that came in the wake of a series of difficult races that had seen him lose what had at the end of August looked like being a championship-winning 34-point lead.

"It's certainly not a catastrophe," he said. "We made a wrong decision today. That's clear, but it's not like the world ended.

"So, obviously, it hurts at the moment, but with time things will get better. There's been lots of difficult moments - this year, previous seasons together - and I feel like you always become stronger through some of these moments.

But it all depends on how you deal with it. So I'm sure we'll get through it. But, yeah, obviously, at the moment, it does hurt.

Verstappen, going for a fifth consecutive crown, is simply revelling in being in a position to win a title that he has spent most of the year thinking was out of reach.

"I know that I'm 12 points down," he said. "I go in there with just positive energy. I try everything I can.

But at the same time, if I don't win it, I still know that I had an amazing season. So, it doesn't really matter. It takes a lot of the pressure off. I'm just out there having a good time like I had today.

It's at McLaren where the hand-wringing will be most intense. And their boss knows what's at stake.

Stella has been here before. He cited two years where the driver in third in this sort of scenario has ended up winning the title. He was involved in both.

In 2007, Stella was race engineer to Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari when the Finn overhauled a massive points gap in the final two races to beat McLaren's Lewis Hamilton and Alonso.

In 2010, he was engineering Alonso when Ferrari messed up in Abu Dhabi.

Stella also worked with Michael Schumacher, starting in 2002, as the German was in the middle of a run of winning five consecutive drivers' championships - but only after the German had lost three in painful fashion in 1997, '98, and '99.

"Racing is tough," Stella said. "Racing may give you tough lessons, but this is the history of champions. I worked with Michael Schumacher. We won several titles together.

"We all think about the titles now, but after Vegas I was thinking how much pain Michael had to go through when he started his experience at Ferrari.

"This is just the history of Formula 1. This is the true nature of racing.

"We are disappointed, but as soon as we start the review, we will get even more determined to learn from our lessons, adapt, and be stronger as a team.

And make sure that this phenomenal, beautiful opportunity that we have to compete for the drivers' championship and be the ones that actually stop Verstappen's dominance in this period of Formula 1, we want to face it as the best of ourselves.

Source: BBC
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