McLaren once again dominated proceedings at the Chinese Grand Prix, with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris delivering a remarkable race pace and showing an eye-catching tyre management across the 56 laps of the Shanghai race. F1Technical’s senior writer Balazs Szabo delivers his post-race analysis.
Although Lewis Hamilton dominated proceedings in Saturday’s sprint race in China, the 56-lap grand prix ended with a one-two finish for McLaren, with Oscar Piastri ahead of Lando Norris, the Australian taking the third win of his career.
For the Woking-based outfit, it was win number 191, it’s third in a row and the fourth at this event, the first in 14 years, since Lewis Hamilton won in 2011. Piastri and Norris secured McLaren’s 50th one-two finish, the second for this driver pairing after they finished in the same order in Budapest last year.
As for the strategy, the race caught the field by surprise. Saturday’s Shanghai F1 Sprint had indicated that drivers would suffer from heavy graining on the front axle, and therefore most of the field built its pre-race calculation around a possible two-stop strategies, with the medium-hard-hard compound combination having been expected to turn out to be the quickest one.
On the starting grid, 17 drivers opted for the Medium for the first stint with only Lance Stroll and Oliver Bearman going for the Hard, while Liam Lawson also opted for the C2, but he started from the pit lane because of a penalty.
Despite the indications going into the race were for a two-stop strategy being clearly the most plausible, the way the race went and the tyre behaviour, drivers were able to handle the mediums on the first stint better than in the sprint race.
Those who started on the Medium pitted to take on the C2 in a window between laps 10 and 20, Pierre Gasly the first to stop and Alex Albon and Nico Hulkenberg the last.
Meanwhile, the three drivers who started on the Hard ran a variety of stint lengths: Lawson came in on Lap 18, Bearman on 26 and Stroll stayed out until 36. Apart from these three, Gabriel Bortoleto had to pit on the opening lap to go straight onto the Hard, before coming in for another set of C2s after 25 laps.
In the second part of the race, it became clear that the Hard tyre was working very well, with only slight degradation. Three drivers (Hamilton and the two Racing Bulls) nevertheless went for a second stop, leaving the rest of the field to go all the way to the chequered flag. Of those who started on the Hard, Stroll and Bearman did their second stint on the Medium.
After Lewis Hamilton had dominated the 19-lap sprint race, Ferrari had been expected to be in contention for the victory on Sunday. However, the situation turned out to be very different in the 56-lap race.
The first stint stint indicated that McLaren had the upper hand in terms of race pace, albeit Ferrari looked extremely close to them, especially Charles Leclerc. The Monegasque picked up a damage to his front wing on the opening lap, and was stuck behind his team-mate Lewis Hamilton.
Despite his damage that led to an aerodynamic loss of up to 30 points, Leclerc looked the quicker of the duo, and was able to extend his first stint like Norris. Interestingly, the Monegasque posted a lap time of 1m38.1 on Lap 14 which was three tenths quicker than what McLaren’s British racer managed, which clearly indicated that Leclerc had much more to offer had he been in clear air.
It’s worth noting that Mercedes driver George Russell had a different approach to his first stint. While the Briton usually looks after his tyre at the beginning of the stints, he started to push very early on in the race, which meant that he suffered a negative delta of 8 tenths between his first and last lap of his stint while Leclerc delivered a time of 1m38.1s both on his first and last lap despite his sligthly longer opening stint.
In the meantime, reigning champion Max Verstappen had a very quiet opening stint as he desperately looked after his mediums after his tyre trouble in the sprint. The Dutchman lost connection to the sharp end of the field during the opening stint, becoming the only frontrunner to drop into the 1.39s at the beginning of the race.
The second stint brought a very different picture of the race. Pirelli’s yellow-banded tyres had already looked slightly more robust on the opening laps, and the hard compound which had not been run on the opening two days of the weekend, caught the entire field by surprise.
The C2 compound was so robust that it enabled drivers to complete the race with a single stop instead of the two stops that had been expected to dominate proceedings. Interestingly, most of the drivers started their second stint gently, and achieved a lift in performance first ten laps into the stint and than again ten laps from the end of the 56-lap Chinese Grand Prix.
Taking a look at the boxplot diagram provided by F1DataAnalysis, there are a series of small differences to recognize between the pace of the main contender of the race.
Oscar Piastri achieved a relatively narrow boxplot with an average lap time of 1m36.89s, with his median lying below his average lap time. Lewis Hamilton achieved the second best average lap time, albeit he was on a two-stop strategy, and considering the second set of fresh tyres, it even more underlines McLaren’s supreme pace.
Norris’ lap times generated a slightly longer boxplot which was partly a result of his brake issue that hindered his race in the closing stages, but also to his initial pace during his second stint which was slower than how Piastri kicked off his hard-tyre run.
Among the top drivers, who completed the Chinese Grand Prix with a single-stop strategy, it was Max Verstappen to generate the longest boxplot. As mentioned above, the Dutchman had a relatively slow start to his race, nursing his medium tyres at the beginning of the race. Interestingly, he did not look too strong on the hards either, but he suddenly found great pace on Lap 35 (21 laps into his second stint). Highlighting the strange behaviour of the white-walled tyres, the reigning champion set the fastest lap on the very last lap of the race.
Leclerc generated the narrowest boxplot which was a result of his very constant pace on the first stint. However, it is also worth noting that the lower quartile of Leclerc’s boxplot is placed higher than his rivals’, which was down to the fact that Leclerc was unable to up his pace in a way Verstappen, Norris, Russell and Piastri were in the dying phases of the Shanghai race.
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