“I think they just wanted to give me a little bit more of a challenge,” jokes Lando Norris after the Formula 1 race at Silverstone. What is meant is his team’s decision to give him hard instead of soft tires during his only pit stop.
“They put me on hard tyres. I don’t know why. They’re still beginners in some things,” grins the Briton, who ended up second despite the decision – or maybe even because of the decision? Because the case wasn’t quite that clear.
When Kevin Magnussen initially triggered a virtual and later a real safety car on lap 33, several drivers used it for their only pit stop of the day. In addition to Norris, there were also Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton.
Important: all three pilots started on the mediums and none had new soft tires. But while McLaren Norris relied on new hard tires for service, Red Bull and Mercedes each opted for a set of used softs.
“I wanted the softs”
“I wanted the softs. I had the impression that it made more sense, especially with the safety car,” explains Norris after the end of the race. And indeed, on the radio of the Brit, you can hear that he questioned his team’s decision several times during the race.
Shortly after the start of the VSC phase, he asked the team for the first time: “Are you still convinced of your decision?” His race engineer then confirms that he will switch to hard tires at the pit stop.
Shortly before his stop, Norris radioed again: “Think about it again. Please!” But the team doesn’t let their decision be dissuaded, and when Norris is in the pit lane a short time later, the radio again says that he will be given hard tyres.
For Norris, the topic is not over yet. Behind the safety car, which is now on the track, he wants to know: “What tires does the Mercedes have?” The team informs him, “Hamilton behind you switched to a used soft.”
plan works
Norris comments sarcastically on the radio: “Great …” But in the end the plan works, because although Hamilton can initially put pressure on Norris when the race is released again, the record world champion cannot avoid the McLaren.
Towards the end of the race he even has to let it tear off and can’t launch another attack because the soft tires have meanwhile worn down. At the finish, Norris is almost three seconds ahead of Hamilton and explains forgivingly: “I’m second, so everything’s good.”
In the press conference after the race, the Brit also reveals that there was a misunderstanding with the team. He thought that Verstappen and Hamilton were driving on new softs. In fact, the two were driving on used tires.
Nevertheless, it is “difficult” to answer whether the choice of tires was correct in retrospect. “It wasn’t really what I wanted, but it still worked,” he says, explaining that you put unnecessary pressure on yourself.
“In the end it worked, so there was no wrong or right decision, but it would have made my life a lot easier if I had been on the soft,” he explains to “Sky” and announces: “We’ll talk about it .”
“We were under no pressure at all”
The situation was somewhat different for team-mate Oscar Piastri, because he pitted just before the safety car – and also got the hard tires. “I think so,” he replies when asked if he would have finished third with the soft tires.
At the same time, he also makes it clear: “I don’t think there was a situation in which we would realistically have raised them.” Because at the end of his first stint on the medium, he struggled a bit with the tires.
“We had a decent gap behind us. We weren’t under any pressure at all. It made sense to switch to the hard tyres. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a crystal ball that a safety car would come three laps later,” said Piastri.
Because of the neutralization, Hamilton got past him and grabbed the last place on the podium. Although Piastri would also have preferred the softs for the closing stages, he explains that nothing went wrong when the decision was made.
“In hindsight, it was a risk…”
Conversely, Helmut Marko from Red Bull believes that the soft tire was the wrong decision. “We had a solid lead of nine seconds. That took the safety car away,” he explains to “ORF”.
“In hindsight, it was a risk [beim Boxenstopp] to take the soft. At the end of the day, Max’s and Hamilton’s tires deteriorated quite a bit. We were happy when the race was over,” admits Marko, who explains that the race shouldn’t have gone much longer.
“[Norris] maybe would have needed three to five laps more, then his tire advantage would have become fully effective,” believes Marko and makes it clear: “In the end we could no longer have challenged these tires.” So if Norris had put pressure on again, it would be tight for Verstappen become.
Because Norris was “always two, three, four tenths faster than us in the last laps,” says Marko. An observation that is not entirely correct, because in the final phase Verstappen and Norris were faster. At the finish, the two finally separated by around 3.8 seconds.
Verstappen: Soft tires “not particularly nice when driving”
Team boss Christian Horner explains the reason for the decision on “Sky”: “We saw that George [Russell] a really good one [ersten] Had a stint on the soft and thought: if he can do almost half of the race on the soft, it should be for the last 14 [Runden] be ok, especially at restart.”
Winner Verstappen himself also explains that the tire choice felt right at first. After a few laps, however, he realized that this might not be the case. “[Der Soft] wasn’t particularly nice to drive,” he reports.
Toto Wolff, meanwhile, doesn’t believe that the tires made any difference at all for Mercedes. He believed “that we could eat up the two McLarens with the soft tires and be second and third, maybe even move forward.”
“But we didn’t have the pace against the McLaren,” clarifies the Mercedes team boss and explains: “They had the hard tires and we had the soft ones. That’s usually a second in our favor. But we still didn’t get it.”