Mark Hughes: How an open four-way battle turned into a McLaren one-two

From the outside, with the all-McLaren grid (Lando Norris ahead of Oscar Piastri), it looks as if McLaren had shown up at the 2024 Italian Grand Prix in Monza with the fastest car and simply picked up where it left off after Norris' dominant win at Zandvoort the previous week.

But achieving this was anything but easy. The Monza track was so different this year, thanks to the new surface and reprofiled kerbs, that virtually everyone had to make significant changes to their Formula 1 cars after Friday practice.

If they had made even the slightest mistake with these changes, Piastri noted, they “could easily have ended up in seventh or eighth place,” as was the case with Red Bull.

Team boss Andrea Stella outlined the challenge: “Monza is very different because the track is now super flat, so you can run with stiffer setups and ride closer to the ground. So there was a bit of scouting to do and the team did a good job in that regard.”

A DIFFERENT STORY THAN ZANDVOORT

This was not like Zandvoort, where Norris and the McLaren were clearly faster than everyone else.

Rather, it was about lining everything up perfectly on a weekend where the base performances of the cars of the four top teams were remarkably close, much closer than the finishing times would suggest.

“I think every driver from the top four teams was capable of securing the first place on the grid,” said Stella. “The real difference was that the driver had confidence in his car, especially as the track was constantly changing.”

“The track has changed a lot from yesterday to today. It has gotten better and better as more F1 cars and other categories have entered. The drivers have got used to the track. Compared to yesterday, there was no big difference in the way the cars behaved.”

“The behaviour was consistent over the few days, which was a strength as we saw different cars being quick in different phases. Verstappen drove a time of 19.6 in Q2 on used tyres. [compared to 20.0s on new tyres in Q3 and Norris’ pole of 19.4s]But it looks like he's lost his balance and Hamilton seems to be in a similar situation.

“The strength of our car lies in its consistency, even when the conditions were very difficult.”

HOW MCLAREN OPTIMIZED ITS CAR

The main changes to the car between the two days were mechanical in nature. Although McLaren used a front wing with a shortened upper flap on Friday, this was replaced by a more conventional one on Saturday.

The reason for this was simply that the clipped wing was not considered necessary.

“We were just experimenting with it in case we needed to lower the rear wing,” explained Stella. “But we found that with the rear wing we chose, we could keep the usual front wing.”

In general, McLaren seemed to be working with a similar amount of wings as Mercedes, significantly less than Red Bull and slightly more than Ferrari.

There is no “right” level. Every car operates at different aerodynamic efficiency levels at different downforce levels. How well a car's optimal efficiency range matches the ideal level for the track can have a significant impact.

An indication of this spread can be obtained by looking at the respective speeds of McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull between the start/finish line and the speed trap directly before the braking zone of the first corner.

The start/finish line is early enough on the straight that your speed crossing the line depends heavily on how quickly you left the Parabolica, so a car with large wings can have a surprisingly similar speed to a car with narrow wings at this point.

But by the time they drive a few hundred meters further through the speed trap, the distance between the two will have grown significantly.

Speeds (km/h) at start/finish and trap

HOW RED BULLS RIVALS WINS THE DAY

Given the amount of time Verstappen spent on the used tyres in Q2, Red Bull were perhaps McLaren's biggest rivals here, but Verstappen was appalled by the sudden loss of grip on his new tyres in Q3.

His final run was also spoilt by his teammate Sergio Perez driving through the gravel trap ahead of him at the exit of Lesmo 2. This not only scattered gravel on the track when Verstappen got there, but he found himself in Perez's turbulence from there down to Ascari and through Ascari.

Verstappen ended up in seventh place.

Given that Piastri was a reliable replacement for Norris, with a lap just 0.1 second slower, Verstappen's problems opened up the opportunity for the Mercedes and Ferrari drivers to become the best non-McLaren driver, a competition overshadowed by George Russell.

He had good slipstreaming at the start of his lap (ironically from Verstappen), and by the time they reached the braking zone for the first chicane he was 0.05s ahead of Norris.

Norris then did not have a good run in the newly formed chicane, as he explained: “It just didn't feel like a safe lap. You want everything to flow.”

“I tried to brake a little harder at first and actually made much better progress in turn one. But then I crashed into the inside curb of turn two because I turned in too early.

“So I was about a tenth and a half of a second behind right after Turn 1. So I thought to myself, 'Ugh, it's over before it even started.' And I didn't really expect to catch up.

“But then I mastered the second chicane and immediately gained one and a half tenths. And from then on I was able to gain a few hundredths in every corner.”

“So it just didn't feel like a safe lap. It didn't feel as good as my lap last weekend, but clearly still good enough for pole, which is a nice feeling.”

In comparison, Russell's Mercedes is just a little more sluggish in the slow corners. He doesn't like really high track temperatures in general and although it had cooled down a bit by Q3, the temperature was still in the high 40s.

Russell failed to push the Mercedes into the driveway as aggressively as Norris and Piastri, his drive through Lesmo 2 was underwhelming and he lost time on the following straight.

He lost 0.257 seconds to Norris in the second sector. It was close in Alboreto (formerly Parabolica) and Russell was oversensitive when accelerating in a place where Norris could be bold.

The Ferrari, with its low drag, was always comfortably the fastest in the first sector, but always lost a little more in the second sector than it gained in the first.

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz finished fourth and fifth, each within a hundredth of a second. Hamilton's Mercedes finished sixth after a weak final lap. “I can't blame anyone else for this but myself,” he said.