ITALIAN GP DATA: HOW MCLAREN’S ‘PAPAYA RULES’ GIFTED WIN TO LECLERC AND FERRARI

Charles Leclerc secured Ferrari an emotional home win at the Italian GP. Despite their clear step forward on Sunday, their win was heavily conditioned by another unnecessary McLaren fight between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

Ferrari lured McLaren into their trap for victory at Monza. The Italian team took advantage of McLaren’s lack of resoluteness with its two drivers to claim their most important win of the year, which also put them back in the fight for the Constructors’ Championship against Red Bull and McLaren.

Italian GP data: How ‘papaya rules’ hurt Lando Norris

Lando Norris initially defended the pole position achieved in qualifying by holding onto P1 at the first chicane. However, what Max Verstappen’s chaser in the World Drivers’ Championship did not expect was that his team-mate Oscar Piastri was going to attack him aggressively at the Variante della Roggia.

An impeccable move by the Australian driver that bordered on the limit of the ‘papaya rules’: fight freely, but without contact. A contact that Lando himself had to avoid and that also cost him P2 to Charles Leclerc too, as he regained speed on the exit.

Obviously, there is nothing to reproach Oscar Piastri for. He played his cards within the ‘rules’. However, the laxity of these ‘papaya rules’ works against the interests of Lando Norris: the British driver needs all the help he can get from the team, and his team-mate, to become World Champion.

Such liberal team orders – because allowing a fight, but adding the ‘without contact’ note is still a team order – cost Norris the chance to cut more points to leader Max Verstappen.

Many of you are probably thinking right now that what I have explained above makes no sense at all. Your argument will probably be that Ferrari won because of better tyre management or less tyre wear.

And this is partly true, but Ferrari’s one-stop plan, although premeditated – as it was also in McLaren’s and all teams’ plans – was perfectly executed thanks to McLaren’s inefficiency. The data from the analysis of this race confirms this.

The race unfolded in two distinct phases. A first phase, which was easy to read for the teams but already gave a glimpse of Ferrari’s intentions. And also a phase in which McLaren partially enabled, having allowed Piastri to attack Norris at the beginning of the race.

Although the latter, as we will see below, also left them in a strategically unfavourable position for the second phase of the race.

More of the key reaction from the Italian Grand Prix

👉 Italian GP conclusions: Time for Norris to toughen up and Verstappen to resist temptation

👉 ‘Papaya rules’ explained: What are McLaren instructing their drivers with new phrase?

Piastri was leading the race with a comfortable margin of three seconds over Charles Leclerc on lap 14. Norris, who managed to close a maximum gap of +1.9s to the Ferrari driver, decided to anticipate his pit stop to complete an undercut on Leclerc and gain back his position in the pit lane thanks to this move, which indirectly put him in a bad position for phase two of the race.

Ferrari, at that point, saw no need to extend his stint to go for the one-stop plan at least with Charles Leclerc. In fact, the Italian team stopped Leclerc on lap 15 to cover from Lando’s successful undercut. Norris regained P2 virtually.

Oscar Piastri stopped one lap later, on lap 16, to cover from both Norris and Leclerc’s attack threats. In this way, McLaren was virtually assured of regaining the 1-2 on track and later being able – or not – to execute more severe team orders than the ‘papaya rules’.

While all this was going on, Carlos Sainz in P4 took the provisional lead of the race. The Spanish driver started to encourage Ferrari about the possibility of a one-stop. Sainz finally stopped on lap 19, coming out in P4 again, more than 10 seconds off the top three leading the race. This was a favourable scenario for McLaren, apparently.

From lap 20 onwards the second phase of the race began, the tyre management and tyre wear critical phase. Oscar Piastri again opened a comfortable gap to Lando Norris and Norris did the same with Charles Leclerc. Both were doing similar lap times and controlling the gap.

However, Norris’ hard tyres went down and fell into a performance ‘cliff’ around lap 28, i.e. his tyres abruptly stopped working. This caused Lando to make a mistake and went long at the Variante della Roggia and Charles Leclerc went from +1.7s behind him to just +0.4s.

In this situation and seeing that the overtake was imminent, as Charles Leclerc was still doing good lap times, McLaren stopped Lando to fit a second set of hard tyres on lap 32.

However, they were less correct in their decision to stop Oscar Piastri for a second time for a couple of reasons. All the scenarios at the time played against McLaren’s decision to make a double stop with both their drivers.

The main reason for not stopping Piastri was that up to the point of his stop on lap 38, Oscar had a gap of over +5.3s to Charles Leclerc and was still running similar lap times to the Ferrari driver despite the fact that he was starting to feel the effects of graining on his tyres.

McLaren, therefore, should have waited for a Ferrari move before making a move themselves that left them in a vulnerable position.

Stopping Piastri meant leaving Ferrari in front with a virtual 1-2, with the threat that they would successfully complete the one-stopper with both drivers or that an accident would allow them to stop under Safety Car conditions and keep the lead.

The other big reason is intimately linked to the ‘papaya rules’ and McLaren’s pit wall inefficiency. Stopping Piastri also meant playing the same card with both their drivers, knowing that Carlos Sainz was virtually assured of going with a one-stopper.

McLaren could have been smarter and played perfectly well with two different strategies: chaser – Lando Norris – and chased – Oscar Piastri – in case they were forced to make a move before Ferrari.

In this way they would not have given the lead to Charles Leclerc and also, in case Charles had closed the five-second gap to Piastri with the same tyre life and tried to overtake him, Oscar could have tried to defend so that Lando could get closer to both of them and, with fresher hard tyres, could have gone for the win.

In addition, by having Oscar as the main chaser hunting Leclerc for the win, this prevented any chance of McLaren executing a driver swap at the end of the race that would have helped Lando take three extra points while maintaining the same result for the team.

The race in Italy has made it clear that McLaren is not willing – at least not yet, although perhaps it is too late – to grant different statuses to its drivers.

That is entirely valid and respectable from Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, but when Lando had to give the P1 position back to Oscar Piastri in Hungary after a disastrous race reading from McLaren’s pit wall, they told Lando that “you’re going to need him and the team” to become a World Champion.

At the moment, it seems by his team-mate’s opening lap moves and the team’s strategic decisions, Lando finds himself fighting alone against Max Verstappen.

McLaren is not giving him the obvious facilities he should receive to complete one of the most epic comebacks in F1 history. Meanwhile, the Constructors’ Championship is becoming more and more papaya-coloured, but Ferrari also looks determined to join the battle for it.

2024-09-02T10:41:33Z dg43tfdfdgfd