McLaren gifts Verstappen victory in Qatar

The orange cars had comfortably locked out the front row of the grid, and yet on a track where overtaking is so very tricky, Verstappen vaulted both Norris and Oscar Piastri via a catastrophic strategic error from the McLaren pitwall to take his seventh victory of the season. No wonder he looked so delighted.

McLaren undone by safety car decision

The key was Pierre Gasly’s Alpine tagging Nico Hülkenberg’s rear tyre out of the Lusail circuit’s Turn One on lap seven. The Sauber spun, clattered a marker board to scatter polystyrene all over the track and ended up beached at the side of the track to trigger a safety car interlude.

Almost the entire field headed for the pits – except the two McLarens. Piastri had crucially outqualified Norris after a morale-boosting Sprint race win on Saturday, and his plan to further reduce the points gap to his team-mate had been enhanced at the start of the Grand Prix when Verstappen demoted Norris to third into the first turn.

But the decision not to pit came back to haunt both McLarens, in a race that was confined by a 25-lap limitation on stint length by Pirelli over fears of tyre failures at a circuit that causes high wear.

Verstappen and the rest essentially claimed a free stop by pitting under the safety car, while both Norris and Piastri still had to pit twice, without an option to switch to a single-stop strategy – so Verstappen was left with an open goal.

Norris lucky to recover fourth

Piastri’s face said it all on the podium. He looked drained, knowing full well this should have been a comfortable win. Instead, he was left with an impossible chase of Verstappen and trailed home second, nearly eight seconds behind the Red Bull.

As for Norris, his second stop dropped him to fifth. He at least was able to limit the damage to his dwindling championship lead after Kimi Antonelli made a small mistake on the penultimate lap, ran wide in his Mercedes and allowed Norris to pass for fourth. The Brit had previously overtaken the Italian after his first stop, but second time around he appeared powerless on the hard tyre to drag past the Merc down Lusail’s long start/finish straight.

“It’s tough,” said a glum Norris afterwards. “We just have to have faith in the team to make the right decision. It was a gamble [to stay out] and we were the ones who took the gamble in a way. Now it’s the wrong decision, we shouldn’t have done it. Oscar lost the win and I lost P2, so we didn’t do a good job today.”

That’s an understatement. A week after both McLarens failed post-race checks in Las Vegas through overly worn skid blocks, here was another clanger dropped by the World Championship-winning team. Now Verstappen is back in the hunt for a fifth consecutive title, despite his Red Bull clearly falling well short of the McLaren’s performance.

Still, for the rest of us, at least it’s set up what promises to be a nerve-wracking finale.

Norris still has a decent lead, but with Verstappen looming and Piastri still within range, four behind the Dutchman and 16 behind his team-mate, the pressure will be off the scale. He has to hold his nerve – which is easy to write, less so to deliver under the floodlights at Yas Marina.

Sainz delighted with a podium

Carlos Sainz Jr. was another to benefit from McLaren’s calamity. He’d qualified seventh, made up two places at the start, then rose further to finish a brilliant third – his second podium finish in his debut season for Williams (the other coming at Baku).

Sainz was clearly struggling for pace on the hard Pirelli in the closing laps, with both Antonelli and Norris closing in. After Antonelli’s mistake, Norris pressed over the final lap but came up short of knocking Sainz from his cherished podium step.

Desperate luck for Hadjar

Antonelli must have been kicking himself to throw away a place so late in the race, but still finished clear of his team-mate George Russell for a Mercedes 5-6. Fernando Alonso finished seventh for Aston Martin despite a quick spin, ahead of Charles Leclerc’s underwhelming Ferrari, Liam Lawson’s Racing Bull and Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull. The Japanese only scored his point for tenth after a late retirement for the man who looks set to replace him as Verstappen’s team-mate next year. Isack Hadjar once again impressed, running sixth until a late tyre failure put him out.

Lewis Hamilton nowhere – again

Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton once again cut a miserable figure at Ferrari. He started 17^th and finished 77 seconds off Verstappen in 12^th. He looks a broken man right now, and has done for some time. Might he be considering to call it quits? The demeanour, his body language, what little he says after every session and race – right now, it looks as if there is only one way to end his Ferrari nightmare.

Verstappen plays it cool on the title

Back to the title fight. Norris still holds destiny in his own hands: if he finishes first, second or third in Abu Dhabi on Sunday a first World Championship will be his whatever Verstappen and Piastri can do. But who would bet against Max pulling off what would be by far F1’s greatest comeback? He’s just so irrepressible.

“I was like, that’s an interesting move,” he said on McLaren’s decision not to pit under the safety car. “I knew that we had a bit of a gap, but you still need to keep the tyres alive, 25 laps as well. The wear is very high around here, but luckily it all worked out.”

And on the championship? “It’s possible now, but we will see. I don’t really worry about it too much.”

Perhaps not. But Norris, Piastri and McLaren will.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.