Oscar Piastri strategy questioned in ‘keep the peace’ claim

Karun Chandhok has pondered whether McLaren’s decision not to pit Oscar Piastri immediately after Lando Norris was in response to the race leader’s slow pit stop.

Norris lined up on pole position at the Austrian Grand Prix, and made a great getaway off the line to lead Piastri, who swooped past Charles Leclerc to run 1-2 to his team-mate.

Were McLaren trying to ‘keep the peace’?

Piastri was all over the rear of Norris’ MCL39 in the opening stint, the Australian sticking within DRS range and even making a lunge for the lead with a late-braking move that led to a lock up on lap 20.

He was fortunate not to crash into his team-mate, with his race engineer informing him that the move was “marginal”.

Shortly after, Norris was called into the pits for his first stop of the afternoon but it was slower than expect as there was an issue with his front left that cost him a few tenths of a second.

But rather than pit Piastri on the very next lap to negate his team-mate’s undercut, McLaren kept the Australian driver out.

Tom Stallard, his race engineer, asked him: “Quick question, better to be four seconds behind Lando with more delta, or one and a half behind?”

Piastri replied: “With delta.”

He pitted four laps later and came out with the gap more than five seconds.

The McLaren battle in Austria

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Former F1 driver Chandhok wondered whether McLaren were hoping to avoid a situation where Piastri got the jump on Norris after his slowish pit stop.

“I wonder, just to keep the peace, looking at Norris’ slower pit stop, whether they didn’t want to run the risk of Oscar overcutting him,” said in the Sky F1 broadcast.

“If he’s on another team, you would snatch that opportunity of the other driver having a slow stop.”

But going on to acknowledge that McLaren were “extending” with Piastri, he added: “What they’re trying to say there to Oscar is, would you like to keep going more and more and more, in which case, Lando, by pitting earlier with his fresh set of hard tyres, is going to eventually have a bigger gap to you.

“They’ve given him the option, and he’s come back with, OK, I want to keep going on these tyres, even if I come out four seconds behind, I will then have fresher tyres to come back at him.”

Piastri, however, wasn’t able to make his fresher tyres count and, after a second round of pit stops, finished the Grand Prix 2.7s down on his team-mate.

It was Norris’ first Grand Prix victory since the Monaco Grand Prix, the Briton eating into Piastri’s championship lead, which is down to 15 points.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella was asked about the team’s strategy call, and explained that McLaren had two options but that Norris’ pace negated Piastri’s tyre delta.

“So you have two options in that kind of situation,” he said to the media, including PlanetF1.com. “The first option is to pit right away, one lap after the car in the lead, so it means you’re gonna be probably a couple of seconds and pretty much with the same tyre age.

“The other option is to delay the stop so that you build the so called tyre delta, and then once you stop, you’re going to be possibly three four seconds, but you will have better tyres, and then you will have a closing stint onto the car that stopped before you.

“In circuits with high tyre degradation like here, normally, staying out gives you a benefit that I think today wasn’t necessarily apparent, because we cannot separate how the strategy work from Oscar from how fast Lando actually was. Because I think Lando was actually fast in the second stint with the hard tyres. And this didn’t allow Oscar to capitalise on the fact that he had built this tyre delta.

“Austria is a special track, is one of those in which the DRS effect is so powerful that when you don’t have a big difference between the two cars, the car behind stays hooked onto the car ahead. So I think in the first stage, that’s what happened.

“But in the second stint I think Lando without the pressure of having to defend all the time, he used perhaps just a one-tenth advantage of pace, and he made Oscar strategy look like it didn’t work out.”

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