Piastri defeats Leclerc with a little help from Norris as roles reverse at McLaren · RaceFans

When Alpine junior driver Oscar Piastri sealed the Formula 2 championship at his first attempt in 2021, establishing himself as the outstanding young talent in single-seater motorsport, his reward was something of a disappointment.

Although he had the chance to drive Formula 1 cars on a regular basis throughout 2022, he would not be racing. At all.

Piastri’s ambition far exceeded his patience, and in McLaren he found a team prepared to commit to him. Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix was further vindication of McLaren’s eagerness to sign him up two years ago.

The driver McLaren poached from their rivals was one whose potential had not been curbed by his year off the grid, but still had lessons to learn that only real racing would teach. Over the year, Piastri grew as his team did, finding more success following as he gained confidence. That first year yielded several podiums and even a sprint race win.

Piastri’s arrival coincided perfectly with McLaren’s return to competitiveness. The 23-year-old began to show the same steely determination and poise at the front of the field that so many of the sport’s greats have before him at a similar age.

He won in Hungary, where McLaren surprised many by deciding not to engineer a victory for his team mate Lando Norris. But heading into this weekend, McLaren made a difficult decision. With Norris was 44 points ahead of Piastri, and 62 behind championship leader Max Verstappen, from now until the end of the year the team would prioritise their leading driver.

All week in Baku, the heat of the late summer sun had nothing on the hot takes of paddock dwellers about McLaren’s change in policy. Rival drivers and team bosses were being polled on the matter by those paid to thrust microphones under their noses. But the two whose opinions mean the most, Piastri and Norris, took it in their stride, showing a level of professionalism and selflessness many drivers older than them never did throughout their time in the sport.

Fate has a sense of humour, however. So it would pass that the very first meaningful session since Norris officially received his team’s endorsement, misfortune left him down in 15th on the Azerbaijan grid. Piastri sat on the front row, 13 places ahead of his team mate and behind the very driver who denied him victory in the last round: Charles Leclerc

Sat between two Ferraris, but ahead of both Red Bulls, Piastri knew the best way for him to support his team and team mate would be to win the race. And with it would likely come the lead in the constructors’ championship. But besting Leclerc at a circuit no one can match him at for single-lap speed would be no easy task.

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The unwashed Baku streets provided mediocre grip all weekend. Nonetheless, the conventional approach of a one-stop strategy was on everyone’s minds heading into the race. The top eight all lined up on medium compound tyres, which they would all have to manage carefully if they weren’t to leave themselves with too long a stint on hards after their sole pit stops.

From his three prior starts from pole in Baku, Leclerc had only surrendered the lead off the line once. When the lights went out, he ensured it would remain that way as he jumped well out in front of Piastri, who was left defending from Carlos Sainz Jnr into the left-hand first turn.

Behind them Sergio Perez, who had qualified ahead of his team mate for the first time in a year and a half, came within centimetres of running into the back of the McLaren. However, the Red Bull had the inside line on Sainz for third into turn two, while behind him team mate Max Verstappen picked off George Russell’s Mercedes for fifth place in much the same fashion.

Leclerc exited turn 16 onto the longest full-throttle section in the sport with his lead just over a second, but by the time the first lap was completed, Piastri was eight tenths behind him. With DRS activated at the start of the second lap, Leclerc could have been forgiven for expecting to be easily caught and passed by the McLaren just like he had by the two Red Bull drivers in the early laps of last year’s race. But Piastri’s efforts to keep close enough to the Ferrari to challenge for the lead backfired as he upset his sensitive Pirelli tyres setting the fastest lap on the fifth tour, dropping from six tenths away to almost a second-and-a-half in one lap.

At this stage Leclerc had two key advantages over Piastri. The first was the higher downforce configuration the Ferrari was running in compared to the McLaren, which allowed him to pull away from Piastri in the twisty middle sector, while the second was clear air in front of him. As Piastri began to struggle with his rear tyres, Leclerc gradually pulled further away in the lead, gaining a handful of seconds on his pursuer. Piastri’s race engineer Tom Stallard revised his driver’s target pit stop lap – “Plan A, plus three” became “Plan A, minus three” – indicating how the tyre degradation was affecting McLaren’s strategy.

But Piastri was far from the only one losing grip towards the front. Verstappen was the first to pit at the end of lap 12 from fifth position, leaving just under 40 laps to finish the race on hard tyres. One lap later, Red Bull pitted Perez who had been just over two seconds behind Piastri. Perez rejoined in sixth – right in front of Piastri’s team mate Norris. Instead of Piastri making sacrifices for the sake of his team mate, Norris was the one the team called upon to act the domestique.

“Perez is leaving the pit lane now – we want to keep you ahead of him,” Norris’s engineer Will Joseph warned him. “Can you do anything to hold Perez up in the middle sector, without hurting yourself?”

Norris obliged, protracting his braking into the slower corners and being deliberately lethargic on the throttle to cost Perez one-and-a-half seconds in his efforts. This proved critical, as Piastri pitted at the end of the lap and emerged just over a second ahead of the Red Bull, who now had to find a way by on track over the 36 remaining laps of the race.

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Out front, Leclerc was almost six seconds ahead of Piastri before the McLaren dived into the pits. Ferrari, unsurprisingly, summoned their leader in at the end of the next lap, but Leclerc’s in-lap was strikingly conservative – almost two seconds slower than his personal best lap of the race through the first two sectors alone and a second slower than Piastri’s out-lap. The net effect was that when Leclerc returned to the track with his new set of hard tyres, his lead was now well under two seconds – albeit with Alexander Albon’s Williams between them.

Once Albon was dispatched, Piastri was tantalisingly close to being within DRS range of the leading Ferrari. Although there were 34 laps remaining – two-thirds of the race still to run – Piastri knew from Monza that he could not afford to let Leclerc get comfortable, with clear air in front of him. But just as his natural racing instinct to attack was kicking in, Stallard chimed in his ear with a word of caution.

“So Oscar, stint one, looks like we’ve damaged the front tyres attacking Leclerc at the start,” he informed him, alluding to those early laps. “Let’s be smart here.” But with all the experience and self-belief he had gathered over the first 38 rounds of his F1 career, Piastri had no interest in being “smart”.

Exiting turn 16 eight tenths behind Leclerc, he was still six tenths away upon entering the DRS zone and three tenths when he decided to throw his car up the inside of the Ferrari at the last possible minute. Somehow, he shed enough of the 340kph he was travelling to make the turn, then immediately repelled Leclerc’s counterattack to complete his pass for the lead.

Although having lost the lead of the race, Leclerc kept his composure. “I couldn’t really be super-aggressive,” he explained later. “I still had cold tyres, I was really struggling to put those tyres [up] to temperature. I just thought it wasn’t that much of a big deal if he would overtake me at that point of the race because the race was still long and the DRS would help me to stay within a second of him and then once my tyres will be in temperature I could overtake him again.”

If Piastri hoped he could pull away from the Ferrari, he quickly found out he was not going to escape from Leclerc. Piastri could not find the second he needed to break Leclerc’s DRS and realised he faced relentless pressure for the final two-thirds of the race.

“I knew that getting into the lead was going to be, let’s say 40% of the job, but I knew that hanging on to it was going to be 60%,” he recalled.

However, other than a few looks along the pit straight, which forced Piastri into a defensive shape into the first corner, Leclerc was having a hard time getting close enough to the McLaren to return to the lead Piastri had taken from him.

“When Oscar overtook me, I was quite calm in the car,” he explained. “I just was focusing on my tyre management, which I did.

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“After 10, 15 laps, I thought that everything was coming together and that maybe towards the end, we would be in a better place. But with the dirty air, I think for 20, 25 laps towards the end, my tyres were completely gone. They were just too quick in the straights for me to attempt anything.”

Whether it was down to their fighting or not, Piastri and Leclerc were slowly being reeled in, bit by bit. First by Perez, who had appeared to be biding his time in third, with Sainz also getting closer to making it a four-way fight for the lead. Perez had gotten within DRS range of Leclerc in the middle of the stint, but fallen back until lap 42. Suddenly, this was shaping up to be a three-way fight for victory.

Despite regular encouragement from race engineer Bryan Bozzi, Leclerc was unable to do much about the lower-downforce running McLaren ahead of him. As Sainz reached to within a second of Perez, the Red Bull driver realised that he would give himself a much easier time of keeping that Ferrari at bay if he could get around the one ahead.

As the four continued to try and strike that fine balance between pushing and managing, Leclerc suddenly reported his rear tyres were giving up. He fell out of DRS range of the McLaren for the first time since losing the lead to him.

Now Perez was the more pressing concern for Leclerc. Entering the closing laps of the race, Leclerc had to focus on his mirrors and try to pick out the large shadow within them that was Perez’s Red Bull in the low evening light. But as they headed onto the main straight for the 49th time, Perez seemed to be in prime position to attack.

Leclerc had learned from Piastri’s own defending from him earlier and pulled left early to close off the inside. Perez went to the outside, but found there was no reward for him there. Sainz, now less than a second behind the pair of them, watched this unfold and managed to power out of turn one and around the Red Bull to claim second. However, his half-hearted look at his team mate into the next corner meant he missed the apex of turn two, allowing Perez to do to him what Sainz had done moments before.

As the two started down the long back straight, Perez drew his front wing up to the centre of the Ferrari. Almost as if magnetically attracted, the two cars seemed to drift into one another, interlocking wheels and sending the pair lurching to the left at around 230kph and into the wall, scattering carbon fibre across the road which Valtteri Bottas, directly behind, had no hope of avoiding.

Despite the two crashed cars on the side of the road and the volume of debris on track, the accident was covered only under local yellow flags before the Virtual Safety Car was eventually deployed over a minute later. While the race was now effectively over, it definitely was for the two culprits – Perez having lost his best chance of a podium since the early races of the season and all the work Sainz had done to catch the lead group rendered moot.

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Ahead of all this, Piastri was sitting pretty. All he had to do was complete the final lap at reduced speeds to claim his second career victory and finally experience the sensation of a grand prix win without any team orders controversies to sour it. At the end of a weekend where so much focus had been on his team mate, Leclerc and Verstappen, Piastri had put all of them – and the entire F1 world – on notice. By following his racing instincts, pulling off one of the boldest passes for the lead seen in the sport for some time and resisting pressure from Leclerc, he had shown just how complete a driver he already is.

“I think that ranks as probably the best win of my career,” he said. “Trying to soak up that pressure for so long in that race that was incredibly tough. I think having clean air did help quite a bit. But I think for me, it has to be one of the best races I’ve done.”

Once again, Leclerc had started from pole in Baku and finished off the top step of the podium. With the benefit of hindsight, the Ferrari driver wished he had defending Piastri’s attack harder than he did.

“That was a small misjudgement, which had a big consequence,” he admitted. “So sometimes it hurts, and it does today. But it’s the way it is.”

Not for the first time in 2024, Russell was the big winner from a late clash between rival cars ahead. He gained a podium finish in third from the crash, but was dissatisfied with what he views as the seemingly random performance of F1’s tyres.

Fourth place belonged to car number four after what had been a brilliant recovery drive from 15th by any metric. Norris chased down and passed Verstappen in the later laps.

The championship leader spent the entire race battling with his car and being beaten by his time mate, only to leave Baku with 10 points while Perez scored none. That meant Red Bull lost the lead of the constructors’ championship for the first time more than two years.

Fernando Alonso drove a lonely race to sixth ahead of team mates Albon and Franco Colapinto. It was an outstanding day for Williams with a double points finish and a vindication of the decision to drop Logan Sargeant for rookie Colapinto two races ago.

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Hamilton found little joy in his slog to ninth from a pit lane start. Even Haas rookie stand-in Oliver Bearman did not seem satisfied with another point in his second race, having driven too conservatively in his opening stint.

But as three F2 champions shared an F1 podium together for the first time, Piastri naturally had the most to be satisfied with. Whether he has to play the support role over the remaining rounds is to be seen, but on this day he had shown that there is nothing second-rate about Oscar Piastri.

“I think today was definitely one of those days where we weren’t necessarily the quickest, but we had a car that could put us in the fight,” said the winner. “We had a pit stop that could put us in the fight. We had some teamwork that put us in the fight. And it all managed to pay off.

“It’s obviously not just down to me, but I feel like I’ve been driving well. It’s been clicking a bit more for me this year in terms of the things I want to work on from last season. And you combine that with a car that’s capable of winning, and results like this are possible.”