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Laurence Edmondson, F1 Editor
MONZA, Italy — For the final 10 laps of Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, Monza’s Centrale Grandstand, which has stood overlooking Formula One’s fastest pit straight for 102 years, erupted in celebration each time Charles Leclerc tore past.
A Ferrari win on home soil had looked unlikely for the majority of the 53-lap race, but as the Tifosi watched the remaining laps count down, they started to believe. From within the cockpit, Leclerc could glimpse the fans rising to their feet and started to sense what it would mean to them if he could keep Oscar Piastri’s McLaren behind him.
“The last three, four, five laps it was quite difficult to keep the eyes on the track and I was obviously looking a little bit in the grandstand,” he said. “I could see everybody was standing up and that was really nice to see. It’s a very special feeling. I could also see some red smoke at one point, so I knew everybody was super excited, but I also knew that I had to finish the job.
“But yeah, in the last five, six laps, I felt like we had it. The tyres felt good and I could see that Oscar was not that fast to catch me before the end of the race if I was not doing any mistakes.”
Leclerc and Ferrari were gambling on making a single set of tyres last two thirds of the race, and by doing so had taken second place and then the lead from Piastri and his McLaren teammate Lando Norris when the Papaya pair pitted for a second time on Laps 32 and 38, respectively. The McLaren pit wall had hoped Leclerc would either follow the same pit call blindly or, by staying out on a one-stop strategy, suffer a significant drop off in performance that would allow at least Piastri to breeze past in the final laps and retake the lead.
The visible emotions of the top three drivers after the chequered flag told the story of how the race unfolded. Leclerc couldn’t hold back a beaming smile as he stood on the top step of the podium after executing a perfect strategy while the body language of Piastri and Norris was tense and frustrated.
For Norris, this was another missed opportunity. As has been the case at every race in which he has started from pole position, the McLaren driver lost first place by the time he started the second lap. At Monza it happened at Turn 4 as Piastri hit the brakes later than his teammate into the second chicane and muscled Norris out of the lead.
The British driver has a genuine shot at beating Max Verstappen to the title this year, but to do so needs to capitalise on every opportunity he gets to close the gap in the standings. Had he won at Monza, which should have been possible from pole position given McLaren’s performance, the gap to Verstappen, who finished sixth, would have closed from 70 points to 52 in one afternoon. His eventual third-place finish means it actually stands at 62.
Piastri’s firm-but-fair overtake appeared to take Norris by surprise, and as he controlled a slide mid-chicane, he opened the door for Leclerc to take second place on the exit. It raised the question of whether McLaren should have issued team orders to stop Piastri taking points off Norris, but other than asking them to play by “Papaya rules,” it seems they were free to race.
Asked what the “Papaya rules” (named in reference to the team’s trademark orange paint) consisted of, after the race McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown said: “With your teammate, race them hard, race them clean, don’t touch. That happened. But it was an aggressive pass, so that’s a conversation that we will have.
“It was a bit nerve wracking on the pit wall, but it’s really just respect your teammate. Lando got a bad run out of that corner as well, so kind of opened the door a little bit, but it would have been nice to see them run one-two a little bit longer.”
Asked whether he could have defended harder against Piastri on the opening lap, Norris added: “Just brake a bit later. Simple as that. But sometimes it’s easier said than done.
“Oscar obviously braked on the limit and gave me space. It was just about enough. I did my best to avoid anything else happening at the time.
“But at the same time, if I brake two metres later, you don’t know and you can’t predict, but two metres later and it could easily have been a crash. So it’s a tough one. The easiest thing is just to brake way later and force him off and I kind of treat it like anyone else.
“I obviously took it easy. I saw we had a massive gap behind, so maybe I was just a bit too much on the cautious side and paid the price.”
For Piastri, the move for the lead was his for the taking as soon as Norris gave him enough space around the outside.
“I braked later and got around the outside,” the Australian said. “There wasn’t really much more to it than that. We both got through unscathed.
“I knew once I hit the brakes, I kind of got ahead a bit, and yeah, I knew I was kind of entitled to stay on the outside. And yeah, ultimately, for 38 laps of that race, it put me in a race-winning position. So yeah, for me, it was just a good first lap.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella gave no hint that either driver had stepped over the mark, but said the incident, and the possibility of future team orders, would be discussed internally.
“We will have to review together with the drivers, with the videos, understand their point of view and then we will assess together whether they were fully compliant or not,” he said. “We will take the learning, if there is any learning they need to take, and then we will apply the Papaya rules such that they allow us to pursue in the best possible manner both the constructors’ championship and the drivers’ championship, because we have to now be in the condition to acknowledge that not only the constructors’ championship is possible.
“But even from the driver’s point of view, with the performance that we have in the car and some of the struggles we see with Red Bull, it is definitely possible.”
After McLaren’s success at recent races, there was a temptation to think Piastri should have won with ease once he took the lead on the first lap. A week earlier in Zandvoort, Norris had won comfortably ahead of Verstappen, and with the Red Bull driver struggling down the order after a slow pit stop, it was the perfect opportunity to steal as many points from McLaren’s championship rivals as possible.
What’s more, prior to Monza, Leclerc and Ferrari had not won a race since the Monaco Grand Prix in May, and even with a major upgrade package and a Monza-specific rear wing, they were seen as outsiders heading into the Italian Grand Prix weekend.
Unlike recent races, though, Sunday’s grand prix presented a very specific challenge, with Monza’s new super-smooth track surface generating front-left tyre graining that then became the limiting factor over the course of the race. Graining happens when the surface of the tyre starts to roll up into small balls of rubber, significantly reducing grip levels as the tyre slides across the track surface.
For the vast majority of the season, the McLaren has been one of the kindest cars on its tyres, but that’s because the limiting factor on tyre performance is usually the more common phenomenon of overheating the rears. In Monza, the McLaren drivers struggled relative to the Ferraris to maintain performance through the graining, allowing Leclerc and teammate Carlos Sainz to complete one-stop strategies while McLaren pitted twice for fear of losing more time by staying out.
On the face of it, McLaren had the faster car and pitted Piastri and Norris out of the lead, but Stella believes it was not as simple as that.
“In terms of the race today, I think there may be a misunderstanding that the McLaren was by far the fastest car,” he said. “I think Leclerc was as fast as McLaren today because he could stay with Oscar in the first stint, and normally when you have the dirty air [from the car in front] and you can stay with the race leader, you are at least as fast as the race leader.
“This normally leads to some [tyre performance] degradation, like Leclerc had in the final bit of the first stint. And even in the second stint he was behind two McLarens and still he could stay with the McLarens.
“Even if you look at the practice and the qualifying, I think lap times were essentially within the noise of putting together laps. So I think Ferrari this weekend, they were as competitive as us, at least with Leclerc, which for us is somehow bad news because it meant we couldn’t simply cruise in the race and we needed to deal with them and they did a good job at exploiting some of their strengths.”
McLaren’s concerns about graining meant it was not confident enough to commit to a one-stop strategy, and by leaving Piastri’s second stop until Lap 38, it invited Ferrari to go the extra 15 laps and hold the lead until the chequered flag.
Another key factor was that Leclerc, after dropping behind Norris at the first pit stop, had not pushed his tyres hard early in the second stint, while the McLarens had. Pushing the tyres hard early in the stint was a surefire way to induce the graining, so by losing a position and not needing to pump in fast lap times after his first stop, Leclerc was actually preparing his tyres perfectly for a race-winning second stint.
Asked whether he had also considered a one-stop, Piastri said: “Clearly not as seriously as I needed to. I think, for me, it was a big risk to do that. The graining of the tyres has been a big topic all weekend. In practice, once you got graining, it was basically game over.
“I guess nobody really expected the graining to clear up on Charles, from what I heard. So yeah, in hindsight, clearly stopping once was the right thing to do, but from that point in the race with all the information that we’d gathered through the weekend, it seemed incredibly risky and that’s kind of the blessing and the curse of leading the race — the guys behind you can react to what you do.
“For Charles, if he did a two-stop, he would have locked in third, and if he did a one-stop and fell off the cliff, he still would have finished third. But, of course, he pulled the one-stop off and Ferrari look like the hero today.
“Obviously it hurts at the moment, but I think in the moment it was the right thing to do.”
As popular as the Ferrari win at Monza was, it’s too early to suggest they are back in the regular fight for victories. Leclerc, knowing Monza’s unusual track characteristics and new track surface had contributed to the win, warned against reading too much into the result and suggested Verstappen, who suffered his worst weekend since Monaco, would be back as McLaren’s main challenger for the remaining races.
“Before this race, I don’t think I was seeing myself challenging for wins anywhere else,” Leclerc said. “Singapore maybe could be a strong track for us, on the other tracks, I still feel like we are a step behind McLaren and Red Bull.
“But today we’ve seen that we can be very on a par with McLaren if we do everything perfect. Again, I think that the upgrade has helped us in some ways today to have the same pace as them.
“However, for the other tracks, I don’t know whether it will be enough to completely close the gap, especially the gap we’ve seen in the previous races, not here. So, yeah, we’ve got to wait and see, but we’ve done some steps forward. I think we need some others.”