The two factors that ruined Norris’s US GP win chance

A weekend of perfection for Max Verstappen around COTA keeps alive the amazing possibility of a title which looked lost long ago. A maximum tally of 33 points from the weekend, with McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri taking 18 and 10 respectively ratchets up the pressure further with five races (and two sprints) to go. 

The pattern of the race was decided by the 180-degree change in wind direction from qualifying – and Charles Leclerc’s unusual choice of the soft as his starting tyre. Verstappen may have won, whatever the shape-defining factors were. But that combination damaged Norris’ chances of taking the fight to the Red Bull driver. 

Ferrari and Leclerc were figuring that actually the softs may have got them the lead from the second row and with the clean air this would have facilitated their pace would be so much better. He came close to doing it, but not quite, and like that Verstappen was released.

But Leclerc’s superior traction off the line did get him side-by-side and eventually ahead of the faster McLaren of Norris. “I didn’t want to go too wide in Turn 1 because I didn’t want to end up in the gravel again,” said Norris. “So I kind of had to just stay on the inside and stick to the safer route.” 

He and Leclerc had been separated only by hundredths in qualifying, but in race trim, the McLaren was much the faster car. Comparably fast to the Red Bull (albeit with the proviso that we don’t know how much Verstappen had in hand). But now stuck at the Ferrari pace for a long time while Verstappen escaped, already 1.4s clear at the end of the opening lap. 

Turns out that Ferrari starting tyre choice was absolutely the right one. The change in wind direction meant a tailwind in those slow corners requiring a lot of mechanical grip – perfect for the soft, disastrous for the hard. Down near the back Esteban Ocon, Alex Albon and Isack Hadjar had all started on the hard and it was quickly apparent it was too slow.

But this still needed to be a one-stop race because tyre temperatures imposed a slow pace regardless of strategy. To drive at the pace required to overcome the extra 21s loss of a pitstop would have the tyres 1s per lap slower after just four laps (that’s just how much energy those fast esses take from the tyre). A one-stop in which the hard was too slow meant a combination of medium and soft and if, like most, you’d started on the mediums, that defined a long opening stint. Otherwise, you’d give yourself too many laps to do on the softs. 

So not only was Norris stuck behind Leclerc as Verstappen ran away, taking life out of his tyres as he diced with the Ferrari and ran in its dirty air, but he was stuck there for a long time as he couldn’t afford to try to undercut too early. 

It took until lap 21 until Norris found his way by, by which time Verstappen was almost 11s in the lead. Norris would lose further time in the second stint as he had to find his way past Leclerc all over again, as the Ferrari had got ahead by virtue of its much earlier stop. Although Norris had stopped 10 laps later than Leclerc, the soft tyres he’d had fitted had already done six laps of qualifying. Therefore compared to Leclerc’s new mediums, there was only a four-lap offset.

The pace difference was therefore not so big and furthermore, the surface of the softs would overheat as soon as you got close to the car ahead. Eventually, the carcass overheats and the grip degrades badly. With only 10 laps to go, Norris was radioing in that he’d lost the tyres. His engineer, Will Joseph did a great job at this point in reassuring Norris that if he just backed off for a few laps, the carcass temperature would come down and he’d be good to attack again. 

With five laps to go Norris got by the Ferrari with a move from a long way back into Turn 1, but this ran him out so far wide on the exit that Leclerc – who was driving a perfect defensive race – was able to repass. But the inevitable was coming and later in the lap Norris surprised him again – this time by going for the dirty inside line at the end of the back straight into Turn 12. It was a disciplined second stint for Norris, given that he was on his final warning for track limit transgressions after just 19 laps. 

Verstappen’s mirrors were clear for most of the race, even as he felt a sometimes-alarming change of balance from one lap to the next. The car wasn’t perfect, he said. But no-one’s was in this gusty, bumpy place and the heat it puts into the tyres. It was better than it had been in his winning sprint race, though, where he felt the rear grip was very limited and doubted that he would have been able to keep the McLarens behind had they made it through Turn 1.

Back at Milton Keynes the simulator guys were flat-out in working out a better solution overnight, one which must be judged a great success.  

Lewis Hamilton on a conventional medium/soft strategy was fourth, limping through the last lap with a suspected front-right puncture and just holding off Piastri’s McLaren. The latter was two-tenths off Norris’ pace all weekend, just as he was here last year.

There’s something about how this track has to be driven which doesn’t sit well with his natural driving style. “When the conditions are such that we have low grip, you really need to challenge the car, lean on this understeer, oversteer, locking,” explained team boss Andrea Stella, “and this is an area of his driving that he has an opportunity to improve.”

It was all Piastri could do to hold off George Russell at the pitstops despite the Mercedes being nowhere near the competitive force it had been at Singapore. Russell was still close behind the McLaren at the end. “I thought before the race that it was likely wherever we exited Turn 1 would be the place we finished. That was due to the expected level of degradation and similar pace of the front-running cars. That is exactly how it played out and, sadly for us, we lost positions at that first corner. I made a good start but got boxed in behind Lando. So Lewis and Oscar were able to overtake me around the outside.”

The Kimi Antonelli/Carlos Sainz collision in the early laps left the lower points open for Yuki Tsunoda, Nico Hulkenberg, Ollie Bearman and Fernando Alonso.   

Meanwhile Max Verstappen rates his chances of winning the title as, “50/50. Either I win it or I don’t!” His task is simple. Those of the McLaren guys are less so.