An incredible McLaren decision to not pit either driver under an early safety car has seen Max Verstappen win the Qatar Grand Prix and set up a three-way title showdown in Abu Dhabi.
Oscar Piastri finished the race second to extend his winless drought, while championship leader Lando Norris had to pass Kimi Antonelli on the final lap to save fourth.
It leaves Norris as the championship leader on 408 points, but now only 12 points ahead of Verstappen, and 16 ahead of Piastri who has slipped to third.
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An incident on Lap 7 brought out the safety car and saw Verstappen dive for the pits, while McLaren didn’t give up track position and kept its drivers out.
It swiftly became clear it was the wrong call with Verstappen set up for the race win due to the cheap pit stop — he ended up winning comfortably by more than seven seconds.
There was a suggestion during the race that McLaren was frozen by inaction, afraid of appearing to favour one driver over the other in a double stack, or in the event that the safety car only lasted long enough to pit one driver.
In this situation, Norris was the title leader, but Piastri the better driver in Qatar with track position, making it a difficult call as to who would be given preference.
“I would have brought at least one in but that’s easy for me to say from my position here,” Williams team boss James Vowles said when asked on Sky Sports.
Martin Brundle said: “This has worked out horribly for McLaren. Those behind have pitted and they have not.
“It feels to me as though McLaren have missed a trick.”
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Piastri reacts to Qatar chaos | 01:25
Norris called out his team over the decision, saying over team radio: “We should have just followed him in, no? If we knew the car ahead was staying out.”
Piastri gave less away, but two interactions later in the race as he tried to haul back the lead from Verstappen, and after the chequered flag, were telling.
Told he needed to be lapping in the 1:22s, which was a whole second quicker than he was lapping, he offered a sarcastic response.
“Well … nice,” he said.
At the end of the race, Piastri said: “Speechless.. I don’t have any words.”
The drama didn’t end there.
There was a claim from Max Verstappen’s engineer Gianpiero Lambiase at the end of the race that Antonelli appeared to “pull over and let Norris through” — the suggestion being that Mercedes would prefer a McLaren driver to win than its bitter rival.
The theory was pushed further by Red Bull racing supremo Helmut Marko while, in response, the claim was brutally rubbished by Mercedes boss Toto Wolff.
“Helmut, this is total, utter nonsense. That blows my mind, even to hear that,” Wolff said.
“We’re fighting for P2 in the championship, which is important for us. Kimi is fighting for a potential P3. How brainless can you be to even say something like this?”
Oscar Piastri post race, and the safety car incident in the Qatar Grand Prix.Source: FOX SPORTS
Meanwhile, Sky Sports reporter Ted Kravitz noted that after the race that the McLaren garage appeared “shell-shocked”.
“Normally at the end of these races I speak to Andrea Stella or Zak Brown quite quickly,” he said.
“They are shell-shocked down here at McLaren. They don’t know what to say, they have gone down to the back of the garage.
“They said no interviews until after the podium. They need to go and understand, get their ducks in a row, and explain this all away.”
Brown later emerged, saying the team felt “terrible” and owning up to the blunder.
“We made the wrong decision, feel terrible for Oscar and Lando, Oscar was absolutely impeccable all weekend so we let them down,” Brown said.
“You win and lose as a team, but definitely not a great moment. Our evaluation… was clearly incorrect so we’ll go back and study that, nothing we can do about it now.
“Got nothing to do with it” | 01:36
“We’re leading the championship, put Oscar at a deficit and left some points on the table, so we’ll just do what we can in Abu Dhabi, we were very strong there last year.”
Verstappen could not believe his luck, having taken the pit stop opportunity while watching his rivals blow it.
“I didn’t expect to win, for sure,” he said. “On pure pace, we are not at the same level as them (McLaren) but we made the right call and it gave us almost a free pit stop and it made the race for me.
“It meant two long stints but we managed the tyres well and they caught up, but not too much. And that decision won me the race today.”
Verstappen has been vocal about McLaren’s missteps and was asked if they had just made another that could add up to him stealing the title.
“Another one? … Yes,” he said.
“They missed the whole opportunity. On pace, they are faster, but today showed that anything is possible and, with a positive mindset, we will go to Abu Dhabi and do our best and try to win.”
Oscar Piastri was shattered and Max Verstappen elated after an astonishing Qatar GP.Source: Getty Images
Piastri remained measured when out of the car, but made no secret of his bitter disappointment.
“Clearly we didn’t get it right tonight,” he said.
“I drove the best race that I could and as fast as I could. There was nothing left out there.
“I tried my best but it wasn’t to be tonight unfortunately.
“I think in hindsight it’s pretty obvious what we would have done, but I’m sure we’ll discuss it as a team.
“It’s not all bad. It’s been a really good weekend and the pace has been very strong.
“Obviously it’s a little bit tough to swallow at the moment.”
He later added: “I haven’t spoken to anyone but I feel pretty c**p as you can imagine. I don’t know what to say.
“We didn’t get it right with the strategy. The pace was very strong. I didn’t put a foot wrong. Just a shame.
“I left it [whether to pit] in the team’s hands to decide what the best strategy was. They had more information than I do. But, yeah…”
It was Verstappen’s seventh win of the season, his third in succession in Qatar and the 70th of his career.
“That was an incredible race for us,” said Verstappen, who had written off his title hopes at the end of August before embarking on a sequence of results that turned a 104-point deficit to Piastri into a four-point advantage.
“We made the right call as a team to box under the safety car and it was scrappy, but we got there in the end.”
Red Bull’s race strategist Hannah Schmitz joined Verstappen on the podium to mark her part in his success.
Sliding under the radar was one of the biggest results of the race that saw Williams’ Carlos Sainz reach the bottom step of the podium.
— With AFP
Race winner Max Verstappen and second-placed Oscar Piastri talk in the drivers press conference after the F1 Grand Prix of Qatar.Source: Getty Images
QATAR GRAND PRIX TOP 10
1) Max Verstappen, Red Bull
2) Oscar Piastri, McLaren
3) Carlos Sainz, Williams
4) Lando Norris, McLaren
5) Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
6) George Russell, Mercedes
7) Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin
8) Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
9) Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls
10) Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull