Up until the last four laps of the Russian Grand Prix weekend, Lando Norris had done everything right. He took his first pole position in Saturday’s qualifying session, ironically in conditions that mirrored the transition from dry to wet at the end of the race on Sunday, pulled off the perfect dry-weather tyre strategy in the first 49 laps of the race at Sochi and, it seemed, had just about enough performance to hold off Lewis Hamilton’s faster Mercedes until the chequered flag.
But as his first Formula One win started to come into view, a storm was brewing to the south of the circuit. Dark clouds were rolling in off the Black Sea and the ships on the horizon were soon lost behind a curtain of rain.
Ultimately, of course, the rain hit. Norris was left skittering around on slick tyres after the majority of the field had made the switch to wet-weather intermediates, and he dropped from the lead of the race to eighth before making up a single place to finish seventh.
It’s easy to point the finger. A stronger radio call from the McLaren pit wall would have resulted in a race win as, perhaps, would a calmer head in the cockpit. But those judgements are laden with the benefit of hindsight and, had the rain eased off in the final four laps, Norris would have been heralded as a genius.
Yet McLaren was clear on Sunday night: lessons must be learned. As such, what follows is a deep analysis of the final eight laps of the Russian Grand Prix: the mistakes made, the opportunities missed and reason a seven-time world champion with an equally successful Mercedes team calling the shots from the pit wall came out on top.
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Lap 46
Norris leads Hamilton by 1.345s at the start of the lap
As Norris crossed the line with eight laps remaining, umbrellas started going up in the grandstands. The first drops of rain were rolling in from the coast and Turn 5, the most southerly corner on the circuit, was starting to get damp.
Norris was made aware of the umbrellas by his race engineer, Will Joseph, and replied over team radio, “it’s spitting quite a bit” as he came through Turn 5.
Norris noted more rain through the middle sector, to which Joseph replied “OK, understood”.
Lap 47
Norris leads Hamilton by 1.167s at the start of the lap
After a chipping away at Norris’ lead lap after lap, Hamilton was just over a second off the lead McLaren as they started lap 47. Within the next few laps he would aim to get within a second, meaning he would be able to attack with the help of the Drag Reduction System (DRS) overtaking aid on the pit straight.
The rain was still light, but the loss of grip around Turn 5 to Turn 10 meant Norris went 3.6s slower than he did on the lap before. But the information from the weather radar over a longer-term weather forecast was still inconclusive. The McLaren team was willing the first band of rain to pass through but remained hopeful a second, heavier one wouldn’t follow. “Okay Lando, this intensity [of rain] will stay until the end of the race, we think,” Joseph said.
But as Norris exited Turn 4 with a bit of wheelspin, Hamilton visibly closed the gap to fill the McLaren’s mirrors heading to Turn 5.
“Possibly wet from here until Turn 10,” Joseph told his driver as Norris caught a slide that sent him wide and off the track.
Hamilton sensed an opportunity and almost got alongside Norris on the exit of the corner, but with more to lose in terms of his title battle with Max Verstappen than to gain by taking the lead at that particular moment, he thinks twice about attempting an overtake.
Norris then pulled a bit of a gap over Hamilton through the middle sector, and on the back straight Joseph informs him “no more LICO needed”, which appears to be an instruction for Norris to stop fuel saving by LIfting and COasting at the end of each straight.
It’s clear that McLaren is keen to give Norris every opportunity to hold off Hamilton.
Lap 48
Norris leads Hamilton by 0.0996s at the start of the lap
Initially, Norris was dealing with the slippery track surface well and started to extend his lead over Hamilton once more in the opening part of the lap. If the earlier radio message about the intensity of the rain staying the same held true, Norris still looked in good shape for the victory.
But Mercedes’s pit wall was more wary of the weather and, as the chasing car, perhaps more willing to react. Hamilton’s engineer, Peter Bonnington, calmly opened the radio and told his driver, “Rain intensity is increasing. It’s wet at the far end of the circuit”.
At the same time, Mercedes had already decided to pit Hamilton’s teammate, Valtteri Bottas, to make an early switch to intermediates. Up to this point of the race Bottas had a shocker and was running down in 14th place with nothing to lose when the pit call came through.
Not only was it the right thing to do for Bottas’ race, the Finn would act as a useful barometer for how the intermediate tyres would perform in the changing track conditions. Bottas comes in at the end of his lap 47, by which point the leaders are already halfway round the track on lap 48.
“The key to it was how you were interpreting the weather forecast, because all the teams have got the same rain radar,” Mercedes chief trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin said after the race. “We could see the rain coming in, we could see that it was going to start light and what we could see was that it was then going to get heavier, and that was really the thing we were reacting to.
“But in some ways, our decision making was helped by the fact that Valtteri was out of the points and had nothing to lose and we were the first to make the jump. Certainly not leading the race makes it a bit easier to take those decisions.”
Hamilton was informed Bottas had pitted and was told by Bonnington, “We are ready in the box if you need it.”
The tone of the message was still very much in the dialogue phase and not an order. Hamilton responded: “It’s pretty slippery but it’s not raining much.”
Meanwhile, Joseph could also see the conditions worsening and was keen to coach his driver round the track, “Careful through Turn 5,” he says and “yellow flags at Turn 7”. Norris, who remains silent at this time, sails wide at the apex at Turn 7 and into the run off, but it makes little difference to his lead as Hamilton, who kept his car on track through the same corner, was also struggling for grip.
Norris then came up to lap Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri, and for the first time a sense of urgency came across in his radio message: “I need blue flags!” he says, referring to the flags shown to a car when it is about to be lapped and needs to move out of the way.
Once past Tsunoda, Norris is told DRS has been disabled by race control due to the slippery track surface — another indication that the weather is about to get worse.
Meanwhile, Mercedes could see that Bottas had found a big lap time benefit on the intermediates and are also becoming convinced that a second band of rain will hit the track in the next 30 seconds. If anything, the rain has eased up in the final sector of the lap where Norris and Hamilton are, but the pit wall is convinced it won’t last and more drivers are struggling to keep their cars on the track around the lap.
“Box, box. Box, box for inters,” Bonnington tells Hamilton.
But Hamilton, who can only judge his progress by the distance to the McLaren in front and the fact he has fewer rain drops on his visor than the previous lap, ignores the call and stays out on track.
Talking after the race, Hamilton said: “Lando went off the track in Turn 7 on one lap and I was like ‘OK, OK, stay out, it’s most likely going to happen again, I’ll try to catch him out’.
“Then they called me in and I was like: ‘Yeah, but he’s right there!'”
Lap 49
Norris leads Hamilton by 2.087s at the start of the lap
As Norris crosses the line to start another lap his voice sounds stressed over the team radio: “How many laps to go?”
“Four to go,” replied Joseph, before correcting himself: “Four after this one, four after this one. Some cars are pitting for inters. Bottas has gone already.”
At this point, not only was the rain radar hinting at a switch to intermediates, so are sector times. The middle sector of Bottas’ out lap from the pits on intermediate tyres was 5.3s faster than Norris’ middle sector on the same lap and he gained another 1.5s in the drier final sector. If the weather continues to roll in from the Black Sea, there is little doubt that intermediates will soon start to offer a significant lap time advantage.
“So this is the crossover time,” Bonnington tells Hamilton as he coaxes his Mercedes through the long, sweeping Turn 3. “We have cars going off track.”
Red Bull has already seen the way the race is going and pits Verstappen, who makes up two places in the final sector of his in lap as Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz spin off the road in front of him and then follow him into the pits. This is a key moment for Mercedes too, because as much as the team wants to win the race, it knows Hamilton’s main goal in the championship is to finish ahead of Verstappen, so the only logical step for Hamilton now is to follow his title rival into the pits the next time round.
As more cars start to fall off the track in front of the leaders, McLaren doesn’t appear to be aware of Mercedes’ thinking. Norris is about to enter the treacherous Turn 5 and, once again, the main concern is ensuring he knows what’s coming in terms of track conditions rather than discussing strategy options.
“Track very slippery from here to Turn 10,” Joseph tells Norris. “Lots of cars going off.”
Over the previous few radio messages it was clear the stress levels were building in the cockpit of the McLaren and at this point they final spill over.
“Yeah, shut up!” comes the reply from the 21-year-old.
Despite Norris’ frustration, Joseph wants to keep the dialogue going. McLaren knows the weather could turn this race on its head and, even though the team doesn’t issue an order, it knows a pit stop at this stage could be crucial.
“Lando, what do you think about inter? What do you think about inter?” Joseph asks as Norris heads down to Turn 13.
“NO!” Norris yells in response as he comes up behind the lapped cars of Antonio Giovinazzi on slicks and Nikita Mazepin, who has already switched to intermediates.
“I need blue flags, what are they doing?” Norris follows up, with no further conversation about whether to pit at the end of the lap.
The conversation on Mercedes’ team radio sounds more relaxed, even though the team is now desperate for its driver to pit. Hamilton still seems content to remain on track, but Mercedes knows it can bring Verstappen into the conversation in order to twist its driver’s arm.
“Verstappen has pitted for inters,” Bonnington tells Hamilton on the approach to Turn 13. “It looks like Norris might do as well. We have a free gap, so box, box. Box, box.”
But as Hamilton negotiates Turn 14, 15 and 16 he’s still having doubts.
“It’s stopped raining, man,” he replies.
At this point Mercedes head strategist James Vowles was about to intervene. He had his finger hovering over the button to open comms to his driver and lay down the law — under Mercedes’ pit wall protocol, whatever Vowles says goes, regardless of what the driver might think.
But just as Vowles is about to open his radio communication to the car, Hamilton hits the pit confirm button on his steering wheel, signalling that he intends to enters the pits and switch to intermediate tyres. “The key point that we were thinking to get across to him is that Max had stopped, and with Max having stopped it was certainly key that we shadow what he was doing even if it meant that we might leave the door open for Lando to take a win,” Shovlin explained after the race.
“The other thing that we had to get across was that we thought the rain was going to get heavier and therefore jumping early was going to be better. With all these things, it’s very much a case of getting the right information to the driver because we were very clear on what we wanted to do.
“The drivers don’t have the luxury of rain radars and things, so it’s just a case of making sure that they can understand why it is that we are trying to make that decision.”
Lap 50
Norris leads Hamilton by 18.464s as Hamilton exits the pits
As Hamilton pits behind him, Norris’ only hope for victory is that the weather eases off and the track starts to dry. Bottas’ previous lap was just over three seconds faster than Norris, so there is a chance that if Hamilton is limited to a similar lap time improvement over the remaining four laps, Norris could still hold on for the win.
“Okay, Hamilton has taken it — he’s gone to an inter,” Joseph informs Norris.
“Yes I see, I see,” Norris replies. “We just need to commit to slicks”
Lap 50 is the trickiest lap yet for Norris. He passes Mazepin (who is already on intermediate tyres) on the entry to Turn 5 but has zero traction on the exit and the Haas, which is usually the slowest car on the grid in normal conditions, sails back past.
But at this stage it’s still not looking disastrous in the first and final sectors of the lap, and Norris repasses Mazepin through Turn 15 and Turn 16. At this point, the prudent choice to score a podium was still to switch to the intermediate tyres at the end of lap 50, but with Hamilton finding roughly four seconds around the lap a pit stop now would have conceded the race victory to Mercedes.
McLaren and Norris are all in on the slick tyre gamble and at this stage are willing to win or go bust.
“Okay Lando, just to confirm, we have to be able to stay on track here,” Joseph tells Norris. “You have to stay on this tyre.”
Lap 51
Norris leads Hamilton by 14.995s at the start of the lap
As Norris starts lap 51 things don’t look good. The second, heavier band of rain has hit Turn 5 and even in Turn 3 the McLaren driver is at less than half throttle as he tip-toes through the corner. Coming out of Turn 4 he is met by a wall of spray and a fully wet track.
“It’s f—— … it’s so wet boys!” he says over team radio. “I’ve got to box. I want to swap, I can’t do this!”
Norris’ car then slithers wide on the entry to Turn 5, spins 180 degrees and comes to a halt. He keeps the engine running, but as he gets going again, Hamilton swoops past and takes the lead.
On the back straight, Norris is struggling to keep the car in a straight line with wheelspin in fourth gear. He only just reaches fifth gear before needing to brake on a section of track where the cars would usually be comfortably full throttle in eighth gear.
He manages to get back to the pits, but with no grip from his slick tyres runs wide on the pit entry and crosses the white line between the pit lane and the race track. As he does so, Verstappen passes him to take second place. The Red Bull driver had started the lap 73 seconds behind Norris, underlining just how much time was lost as the worst of the weather came over the track.
Lap 52 and 53
Norris finishes the race 87.224s behind Hamilton
Norris rejoined the race on lap 52 battling with Kimi Raikkonen for seventh position — a fight he managed to win on the last lap. He then returned to the pits at the end of the race, turned off the car and sat motionless for a minute or two with his head resting against the cockpit protection.
Just four laps earlier he could almost taste the champagne from his first F1 victory, now he was leaving Russia without so much as a trophy for his efforts.
What did McLaren say after?
With the benefit of hindsight, McLaren’s mistakes are clear. Perhaps the biggest one came on lap 49 when the team should have been aware that Hamilton would have to pit to cover title rival Verstappen and pitted Norris from the lead. On that lap, McLaren raised the possibility of pitting, but at no point did it order Norris to do so.
Norris was clearly feeling the pressure at that point of the race, with two terse responses to Joseph’s attempts to start the dialogue, and in his mind wholeheartedly believed that the slick was the better tyre to be on. McLaren’s pit wall had the benefit of information from the rain radar as well as the lap times of other drivers who had already pitted, but demanding a driver to pit from the lead of a race when he clearly doesn’t want to, and may not even need to, is never an easy decision.
“As always in these tricky situations, it is about the communication between the driver and the pit wall using all the information we have available in terms of weather forecast, what the other cars are doing and trying to brief Lando, but at the same time get the feedback on how the track conditions are,” McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl said after the race.
“That is how we had to make a decision on what to do and whether to pit or not. With all the information he had from us and how he felt the conditions were on the track, he felt good on the slick tyres and in the end we didn’t overrule him as a team. That’s something we need to look into because with hindsight it was, of course, the wrong decision that we made as a team.
“But we win together and lose together. The important thing is to learn from it and move on. I think we have seen a lot of positives this weekend and Lando has done a sensational job all weekend.
“He did a sensational job in the race and unfortunately didn’t end up with the result he deserved at the end of such a weekend. Up to the last three laps it was actually a pretty good weekend for us.”
And Seidl admitted the pit wall itself was not 100 percent sure on what the right move was on lap 49.
“If we would have been crystal clear from the team side and 100 percent convinced it was the right decision to stop, then we would have stopped,” Seidl said. “So in the end it was a close call and, of course afterwards it’s easy to say it was the wrong call.
“But I think it was quite close to saying what was the right thing and that’s why I say in the end it is a team decision together with Lando. The only thing we need to analyse is that if there was any information available it should have led us to make a clear call.”
Perhaps McLaren’s silver lining was that its car was able to race for the win in the first place. The team won as recently as the Italian Grand Prix two weeks before, but prior to that it had not won a race since 2012, so progress is clearly being made.
It might not seem like much consolation right now, but lessons like the one in Russia will improve the racecraft of both team and driver as they look set to become more competitive in the coming years.
On Sunday, the more experienced and better equipped combination of Hamilton and Mercedes won the race, but McLaren can take a lot of pride from making it incredibly tough for them right up until the final three laps.