Lando Norris together with Andrea Stella reflect on how F1 Abu Dhabi GP panned out in title fight, as Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc and Frederic Vasseur add on.
It was not the start to F1 Abu Dhabi GP that McLaren wanted, especially when Max Verstappen took out Oscar Piastri, who further got a penalty for hitting Franco Colapinto. The Australian was on the backfoot from early on, while teammate Norris took charge at the front of the field.
He did have Ferrari’s Sainz on his tail all-through, while teammate Leclerc jumped from 19th to eighth on Lap 1 and was up to third by the end of the first stint, even surpassing Mercedes’ George Russell. Despite the valiant effort, it looked fine for McLaren at the front.
Norris had a minor scare around the pit stop when Sainz gained on him, but once on the hard compound, the Brit managed to eke out a gap. While they had backmarkers, that was not the worry for Stella as much a late safety car intervention which was playing on their minds.
That is why they were hustling Piastri to finish ninth at least, which would have sealed their title even in the case of Norris losing to Sainz. The McLaren, though, did not like the risk taken by Verstappen at the start which took out the Australian and put undue pressure on the Woking-based team.
Vasseur expanded on the penalty taken up by Leclerc where before the battery going bust, they were at a risk already and had no choice but to change eventually. They didn’t change their strategy as they did not want any undue pressure on themselves.
How race panned out –
Norris: “Yeah, I mean, I’m very, very happy. Just as I’m sure everyone in the team is. Today was a very special day for all of us. It was ours to lose today and I’m sure at certain moments people thought that it was not far away from being lost. You know, two Ferraris up there and Charles doing a great job to get back to the podium. Oscar was super unlucky. He got taken out in Turn 1. So for a minute, my heart was like, ‘oh God, it’s not looking as likely’. But if I just kept my head down and kept focused, I knew I could deliver and do what I got to do. That’s that, but the bigger picture of us winning a championship for the first time in 26 years, you wouldn’t have thought that when you say the name McLaren.
“It feels wrong to say that they’ve not won a championship in 26 years. But for me to be part of that, for Oscar to be part of it, is something we’re incredibly proud of. And delivering that for the team has put the biggest smile as possible on everyone’s face. This is the biggest reward you can give back to everyone who designs the car, builds the car, gets the partners. Everyone has played such a big part, so just proud. Proud is my biggest thing. Of course, I’m happy I finished the season this way, but I’m way more happy for the team than I am for myself.”
Sainz: “Yeah, obviously a bit of mixed feelings, I’m not going to lie. I think we all came into this race trying to win the Constructors’ Championship and ultimately we did manage to do it. McLaren have put together a very strong weekend. Lando hasn’t put a foot wrong all race and all weekend. And in the end, congratulations to them because they deserve it. On my side, I tried to do everything I could to keep within reach of McLaren. Before the race we knew that McLaren might have one or two tenths of pace on us and that was enough, you know, to pull a bit of a gap before the pit stops or during the race to have a bit of a buffer and not to feel too much pressure. I think I had a very strong first stint, managed to keep them within reach and within pressure margins, especially when I was told Charles was coming in a good comeback.
“Oscar had obviously that incident in lap one, I thought, we might have a bit of a chance, but then little by little it started to fade. When we put on the Hard tyres, like we’ve seen in many cases this year, the McLaren upped the pace a bit, turn up the pace a bit, and they started pulling away two, three tenths per lap, and that was enough for them to have that safety margin and bring it home. And from our side, I think we did everything we could. Both Charles and I have given absolutely everything this weekend. It hasn’t been an easy weekend for me, obviously, knowing it was the last one. But I did the best I could to stay focused and to do the maximum that the car could do today, I think.”
Leclerc: “No, not really. I mean, again, I’m, of course, really happy about the race. But the disappointment is a lot bigger. You don’t win or lose a chairmanship in the last race. But obviously, it’s over the course of the season and after every single race. And McLaren has just done a better job than us. And congratulations to them. But it obviously hurts when you get to the last race. You know there’s an opportunity. It was a very difficult weekend, obviously, already with the penalty on Friday. It was never going to be easy. But after such a good first lap, the hopes were high. And yeah, we just came short of our dream, which was to win the Constructors’. So it hurts. For the start, I don’t know.
“Maybe in Formula 2, I’ve had a few good first laps. But in F1, I think it’s definitely the best first lap I’ve had. If no penalty, I mean, yesterday, I think P4 was probably the best, which would have been P14 or P15. Then you never know what happens by starting P15, we’ll have had won anyway 11 positions? I think it’s a long shot to say that. So yeah, all in all, I think my first lap recovered basically everything that we’ve had since the beginning of the weekend. So I don’t have any regrets.”
Piastri moment –
Norris: “Yeah, I was watching the TV screens and I saw Charles was P8 after lap one, so I was a little bit nervous! But I knew I just had to focus on myself, put my head down, and Carlos was never far away. I think the biggest I got the gap was to like 4.2 seconds in the first stint, and that’s not a very nice gap in my opinion. It’s a bit too close to my comfort. So it was still a tricky race, and I’m sure there was probably a lot more nervous people on the pit wall and in the garage, knowing what was at stake and things, and I’ve got the adrenaline of the car and focused on that.
“For them, they’re just sitting and watching the screens, and they have a lot more time to think about what can go wrong and all of that. But, yeah, a shame for Oscar. We really wanted to have a one-two today and let McLaren be on top today as a team in a race, but also for a championship, you know, and I felt quite bad for him in the beginning. It wasn’t his fault. But he’s had a great year, so we’ll all celebrate together. I certainly am. And we’ll have some fun.”
Stella: “The first thought I had after checking corner one is that it felt unnecessary. When you have teams fighting for the championship, it’s the pinnacle, it’s the time to harvest the efforts of a season. That felt a little unnecessary, but sometimes adversities give you the opportunity to show your strengths. I think that’s exactly what happened today. First of all because Oscar never gave up and he came back to scoring a point that could have been very important, if not the two points that could have been decisive even in case of a swap between Carlos and Lando.”
Vasseur: “We were focused on ourselves. We knew that we had to do the best job that we could. I don’t want to say that we didn’t pay attention, but the focus was on ourselves and our strategy. If you start to think differently because the others are in front or crashing, you lose the pass. No, no, I didn’t tell something to Carlos [about start around Max]. This is the worst case scenario because if you start the race thinking about this one will take it, this one not and so that you are confusing, you just have to manage the situation. And I think Carlos is professional enough to manage this kind of start when you have Verstappen next to you. But at the end it is like it is. It is not there that we miss something.”
Pit stop scene –
Norris: “Yeah, Carlos said it well, honestly. It was a tough one. I mean, I knew he probably pushed a good amount out of the pit lane to try and get me. I didn’t have the finest in lap. I started to struggle a lot with the tyres. And like Carlos said, a set of tyres and how they perform and how they work on our car is all it needed to shift from them being quicker to myself. I think in the first stint, Carlos was probably the quicker driver-car combo. Just the dirty air is painful, even at three seconds, two seconds. To do that for a whole stint and stay that close is impressive. So I knew that he was very fast. But the whole season, we’ve always performed better on harder tyres. So simply just changing tyres and the characteristic of a tyre changing makes for one team to be the quickest to us to be the quickest.
“And that’s how quickly and easily things can change. So I knew if we just executed a good pit stop, depending on how much he pushed out the box and how much he continued to push, that would decide my strategy, let’s say. Do I also push to cover or do I introduced the tyres in a good way, because it was a long race ahead still. And I saw already in Turn 2 and Turn 3 a place you save the tyres that he saved immediately, which gave me some comfort and allowed me to start saving at the same time. So it’s a difficult one because if he would have pushed too early, he would have completely gone off a cliff and maybe so would I. But it’s very difficult to judge those kind of things at that time of race.”
Sainz: “It was a very tricky thing to handle because obviously I did a very fast out lap to try and get within DRS or within range of trying to overtake Lando after the pit stop. Also, in case they had a half a second to a second slower pit stop that could put us within reach. And that’s why we sent the undercut. Then after he came out in front of me, you go through this thought process of do I push like hell now to get within DRS, but Lando can also push and keep me out of the DRS. And that means I’m going to destroy my tyres and not have a chance at the end of the race of putting him under pressure. Or I save my tyres to try and put them under pressure at the end like I did in the first stint.
“And so it’s very difficult thing to judge with these tyres to use the first three laps to extract the peak of the tyre or to save that to the end of the race. I don’t think it would have mattered. I think McLaren and Lando today, with a Hard tyre, they were just one or two tenths quicker. And he could have used that pace whenever he wanted to keep me at bay, you know. Even though on the Medium I really strongly believed we had a chance, little by little with the Hard, it just seemed like it was getting tougher and tougher. And that’s where I think the weakness of our car started to also appear and the strengths of the McLaren started to appear again. And it slipped away from us a bit.”
Vasseur: “No, we were more expecting to push Norris at the end of the race and on the degradation. But it didn’t happen. But we knew also that overall the delta pace is from one stint to the other one. Between McLaren and us it’s plus or minus one tenth. And this is not enough to overtake. It means that it’s much more on the degradation at the end of the stint than something else.”
Norris’ drive, aware of Ferrari’s potential –
Stella: “Lando showed his strengths delivering a perfect weekend and a perfect race when all the pressure was on him. He stayed very calm. Very calm on the radio. He considered some difficult options that we gave him, like when we said, would you pit in case of safety car or not for a new set. I think we saw Lando at his best and his best is incredibly competitive. I can’t wait to see Lando and Oscar in the future with a competitive car right from race one. The whole season was in the last [Norris] pit stop. A problem at the pit stop and we could have lost the position to Carlos, and we could have lost the championship. The guys delivered what I think is one of the best pit stops of the season, confirming the trajectory, which was not only car performance but was the overall maturity, mentality, emotional resilience of the entire team.
“So all this somehow was given the opportunity to be shown thanks to the accident in corner one. Hopefully in the future we don’t need adversities, and we can have a faster car and we can be just safer and not being in a decisive race at the last races of the season. And yes, we were aware, that’s why we were pushing very hard with Oscar to make sure that we could get P9 because the two points would have been fundamental. And we were definitely nervous because not only backmarkers were a problem but the safety car would have been a problem because Carlos could have done the opposite of what we do. So, if we don’t pit, they could have gone on new tyre and it would have been a problem, if we had pitted, it would have taken the lead and we should have overtaken him, so we were definitely nervous, because of this happening.
“Not so much about the backmarkers, somehow it is expected you lose a bit of grip behind backmarker, but this is not a track where like…there’s a lot of space to overtake backmarkers. At that stage, Lando had built a good gap to Carlos, which was good to see, by the way, because in the first stint there not much to pick in terms of performance between Ferrari and McLaren, but on the harder compound, like it has often happened this season, Lando was the quickest car on track and this meant that we have safety in our buffer.”
Strategy scene, potential puncture –
Vasseur: “Honestly not because I think the most important is to be focused on yourself and to do the best that we can do. Then if you stay close, you don’t know what could happen also. I think we have an issue, a puncture and so that, we are just focused on ourselves to try to do the best. And the best was the strategy that we did. But now it was exactly what we didn’t want to do, to change the strategy or to change the attitude just because we are fighting with McLaren, that we are just focused on ourselves from Friday.
“And I think overall considering the penalty, the track limit and so that we did a good job. But it was the most important just to be focused on ourselves. For Carlos’ radio, we saw nothing. It’s why we didn’t pit him. I think he went on some debris in turn 6 or 7. It was after the crash of Magnussen and Bottas. And I think the week after Qatar he was a bit stressed and under pressure with the puncture. He jumped on the radio speaking about this. It was more the vibration than something else. But no worries about this.”
Leclerc’s drive, battery scene –
Vasseur: “It was mega that he was P8 I think, lap 1 or something like this. And then he overtook Gasly, Hulkenberg, Russell. And this was mega. We were just focused on ourselves again to find the best solution and the strategy because he was still 15 seconds behind Carlos. If you pit again you go back into the traffic. It was more the management of our car than the global picture of the race. For sure, it’s always easier and better and so. But you don’t have to think like this. I think that for sure I would have preferred to have Charles on P1, P2, P3 than with the medical car.
“But at the end it is like it is and we have to do with the penalty that we get. Penalty is in your hands. We have to do a better job on the battery and it is like it is. The risk was not any more a risk. It was a clear statement that we were losing performance. It was difficult to quantify the loss of performance, but it was a decent one. And also with the risk of DNF. At one stage when we evaluated the situation just before FP1, because we were still trying to recharge at this stage, we decided to switch.”
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-abu-dhabi-grand-prix-chaos-on-the-race-start-as-piastri-drops-to-last-after-contact-with-verstappen.1817878174133810865
Here’s gain from Charles Leclerc: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-abu-dhabi-grand-prix-leclerc-makes-up-a-staggering-11-places-on-lap-1-in-the-season-finale.1817882119777496031
Here’s winning moment: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-abu-dhabi-grand-prix-norris-crosses-the-line-to-take-victory-and-clinch-the-constructors-title-for-mclaren.1817889913691908369
Here’s how F1 Abu Dhabi GP panned out
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