Lando Norris title win blocked by one big obstacle, and it’s not Max Verstappen

Lando Norris and Max Verstappen — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 Title Battle

Norris title win BLOCKED by one big obstacle, and it’s not Verstappen

Lando Norris is chasing a drivers' championship win

Daniel Austin

Tuesday 3 September 2024 11:57 Updated: 14:39

When Formula 1 returned from its mid-season break at Zandvoort, Lando Norris had a very clear task for the final ten races of the season: beat Max Verstappen by an average of eight points per weekend. Do so, and he would win the world championship.

In the Netherlands he won the race and gained an extra point for delivering the fastest lap, gaining exactly eight points on second-place Verstappen. At Monza on Sunday Norris could only manage third place, despite starting on pole position, but drove the fastest tour of the circuit once again and beat sixth-placed Verstappen by eight points.

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That means Norris is now 62 points behind and precisely on target as things stand. If he maintains this trajectory, he could be setting himself up for glory in a spectacular showdown at the season finale in Abu Dhabi.

Observers could be forgiven, then, for thinking that things are going swimmingly for Norris and his McLaren team as things stand. But that could hardly be further from the truth.

Team and driver may have made a further indent into Verstappen’s advantage in Italy, but in truth they threw away an enormous opportunity to deal far more significant damage to the Dutchman, whose Red Bull car is suffering a scarcely believable loss of performance having been imperious in the early stages of the campaign.

Out of contention after a woeful qualifying in which his RB20 was inexplicably slower in the final shootout for pole position than in the previous round, Verstappen was a sitting duck in the race as Red Bull struggled with their balance. Starting on pole, Norris had the chance to capitalise.

What did McLaren get wrong at Monza?

McLaren allowed Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris to race each other, despite the latter being in a championship battle

Instead, driver and team contrived to throw the race away as best they could. First, Norris delivered what has become his customary awful start from pole, being passed by team-mate Oscar Piastri into the second chicane before losing out to Charles Leclerc.

Boasting upgrades which seemed to make a significant improvement to its performance, the Ferrari was able to match the pace of the McLarens in the opening stint. But Norris was able to undercut Leclerc in the pits, overtaking him and re-emerging in second place behind Piastri.

That left McLaren in total control of the race, and with the possibility of switching Piastri and Norris’ positions in order to bestow seven more points upon the latter. Instead, they bungled the strategy and gifted victory to Ferrari.

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Allowed to race one another, Piastri and Norris took to hammering around what has historically been the fastest circuit on the F1 calendar, delivering strong lap times but destroying their tyres in the process. Leclerc meanwhile had nursed his, managed to make a one-stop strategy work, and maintained the lead all the way to the finish line after the McLarens stopped for the second time.

As impressive as the Ferrari was, the McLaren was clearly the fastest car on track, and even rivals elsewhere in the field were left bamboozled that they managed to miss out on the win.

“Looking at the race trace, I think McLaren had the pace” Lewis Hamilton said afterwards. “They just pushed too hard. They were doing much too fast laps early on and killed their tyres. If they had backed off and gone longer, they could for sure have gone for a one-stop. I was getting the information [through team radio] of the times they were doing, and there’s no way your tyres are going to last at that pace.”

What should McLaren have done differently?

Lando Norris should have finished higher at Monza

That means that the reduction of the deficit to Verstappen is nothing to celebrate for McLaren – this should have been a minimum of a second-place finish for Norris, if not first. That would have been three or potentially ten more points sliced out of the gap.

With Verstappen in the doldrums, bewildered by his own team’s ails, it is no longer the triple-world champion himself who is blocking Norris’ path to the title. The biggest obstacle the Brit faces is in fact his own team’s management of the situation.

McLaren have been terrifically impressive this season – turning a decent but unspectacular car into the class of the field thanks to a series of tremendous technical upgrades throughout the course of the season. Doing so from where they were last season, mired in the lower midfield and facing a huge restructure of key personnel, is testament to the excellent work done by team principal Andrea Stella, CEO Zak Brown and all of the staff working under them.

Lando Norris has lost crucial points against McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri

But since becoming the fastest team on the grid, McLaren have failed to turn their strategic approach into that of ruthless winners. Having forced Norris to give up what would have been an immensely valuable race win in Hungary to Piastri in order to fix what they viewed as an unfair strategy error of their own, they are now allowing Piastri to directly race, challenge and beat the only driver they have who can win the title.

The move Piastri made into Turn 4 was exquisite, possibly the best overtake of the season so far. The Australian chose the outside line and cut Norris off as left became right, deservedly taking the lead.

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It was an aggressive but calculated move that both avoided contact between the pair and demonstrated his wheel-to-wheel skill. But it was an active hindrance to McLaren’s chances both in this individual race and of winning the drivers’ championship. The fact that McLaren are still allowing Piastri to race Norris in such a fashion demonstrates that they are not taking the prospect of winning the whole thing seriously enough.

Despite the mess they had made of the start, McLaren still had the opportunity to win the race, but lacked the foresight to instruct their drivers to manage their hard tyres in the second stint and seemed surprised that Ferrari had been much more sensible and managed to make the one-stop work. By the time the chequered flag fell, they were left to rue their own errors, just like in Spain, Great Britain, Hungary and Belgium.

McLaren last won the F1 drivers’ championship in 2008 with Hamilton. They know that shots at glory don’t come around all that often. Eight points closer might be better than nothing, but if they don’t quickly find a way to successfully handle being the fastest team in the field, they risk destroying all of their own good work.

Max Verstappen Formula 1 Lando Norris Adrian Newey Monza Zandvoort