Adam CooperIn the latest of his post-race columns, Adam Cooper picks out the key talking points from an exciting Italian Grand Prix.
Ferrari: Hamilton calls for more support in his title quest
The Italian GP turned into a nightmare for Ferrari after Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton battled through the first chicane and the latter dropped down the order after being edged into the gravel.
The on the second lap Leclerc had a huge crash. Fortunately he escaped without injury, but a wrecked car was not what Ferrari needed with another race just days away, and with the cost cap always a consideration.
Given the 50G impact can also assume that Leclerc has lost a gearbox and at least some power unit elements, having just taken the ADUO upgrade.
Hamilton went on to finish in P6, frustrated by the choice of medium tyres and by a lack of straightline performance.
But what annoyed him most was what he perceives as a long of support within the team for his World Championship challenge, even if it is a long shot at this point.
The sort of things he’s referencing are the team trying to give an equal chance with the tow in Monza qualifying, prevarication over swapping the cars when Hamilton was behind and quicker (as in Zandvoort), and of course what happens in wheel-to-wheel racing with his team mate.
McLaren showed in the past that it was happy to let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri race, but when one puts the other offline – and the team loses positions – it’s gone too far.
“I think it comes down to rules of engagement,” Hamilton said after the race when asked by this website what he wanted.
“And when I was at Mercedes, we had written rules of engagement, and so we never really, really had it too bad.
“It was a moment maybe with me and Nico [Rosberg] a couple of times, but more often not it was good. Here there are no rules, and I think that’s something we need to try and fix.”
“I don’t race dirty,” said the former World Champion.
“I’ve always raced clean and fairly, and always left space. I mean, I’ve come into the team and tried to be respectful of space, and definitely not put the team in jeopardy. And I stand by that.
“And that’s all I can talk about is on my side. You have to speak to Fred [Vasseur] about the other side, and decisions that are taken there.
But I’ll keep pushing and try to get more from the team and from our car and from the engineers in design and everything like that.”
After the race Vasseur would not comment on the specifics of the first lap incident, stressing that he wanted to talk to the drivers first.
However he did make a telling comment about backing one (prancing) horse in the title race.
“For sure, the outcome of Turn 1 and 2 is not good for the team,” he said.
“Now to see if we have a team order or whatever, I think that the good comparison that I made was that last year Piastri was the leading McLaren at this stage of the season.
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“And if McLaren put everything on Piastri, Max Verstappen would have been champion. But for sure, at one stage you have to take a decision.
“But I think it was too early to take a decision before Monza. Now we have time to discuss with the guys.”
McLaren: Stella stresses that execution is the key
Execution was the key word in the McLaren camp at Monza, a track that the team knew would be tough given the shortcomings of the MCL40 when it comes to high-speed venues.
Things didn’t go to plan in qualifying as Piastri started a penalised P6 and Norris P8, but correspondingly it was a much better race as they moved up to P4 and P5, with Norris getting ahead of his team mate after a fraught battle.
In reality even after perfect qualifying the best the team could hope was to beat Verstappen to P3.
“At times we executed well from a performance point of view,” Stella said on Saturday evening.. “Like in Q2, we had the two cars P1 and P2.
“Then they ended up P2, P3 at the end of Q2, because the cars were positioned in the right place in terms of slipstream. And both Oscar and Lando drove the cars very well despite the small gaps to the cars ahead.
“But yet in Q2 we managed to do an impeding [Piastri on Liam Lawson]. From an execution point of view, which is the wider aspect of going racing, which is not only pure car speed.
“There are several factors, and in Q2 we had this factor related to the impeding. And yet performance seems to be competitive.
“We go in Q3. I think both cars in the first attempt were positioned well from a slipstream point of view. Probably Lando had too big a gap to the car ahead, I don’t remember very well, but he loses some time in some corners.
“So in terms of execution, again, we leave some performance behind – while I think Oscar did a very good lap.”
In contrast the race was much more positive, despite the ignominy of watching Kimi Antonelli blast past the papaya cars like they were standing still.
“I think this is a race in which we executed racing better than what we did yesterday,” said Stella.
“Yesterday in qualifying we should have qualified certainly better than a P6/P8 on the grid.
“And we reviewed that with the team and with the drivers, and we said to ourselves that today, from an execution point of view, we should have done better and operated higher standards.
“I think overall, we did. We paid a bit of price of the position on the grid, and the fact that somehow with this Formula 1 it is not easy to get an overtake completed and move on – like if we see how much it took for Lando to pass [Pierre] Gasly, and then start to close the gap to the cars ahead.
“We see that there’s certainly been quite a lot of entertainment today, but to some extent there were also some issues for a quicker car to be able to compete, if you don’t start at the front of the grid.”
Alpine: Gasly proves his point
Pierre Gasly’s pole position was one of the stories of the weekend, and if McLaren was guilty of not executing perfectly on Saturday, it was the opposite for the Enstone team.
Not only did the team go into qualifying with an ideal set-up for a one lap charge, Gasly got good tows in all the sessions – helped at times by team mate Franco Colapinto – and he was positioned perfectly behind Lewis Hamilton for the final blast across the line.
The Zandvoort upgrade package also played its part, although it will be more useful at other upcoming venues. But what this really showed is that Gasly is one of the very best drivers not currently employed by one of the top four teams.
“Quite a lot of emotions,” the Frenchman said after the session. “I’m just extremely happy for the whole team. I’m extremely happy with our performance. It’s been nine years I’m in F1, trying to give my best absolutely every single weekend, and it’s not every time we get a car to fight for pole position.
“Today it was the case. I’m really, really happy, really proud to have seized this chance, and to make it work. It was a heck of a lap.
“We’ve been on it since the first lap in Q1, it’s been feeling good. And, nine years waiting for that moment, that feeling. I got my first win here in Monza and now I get my first pole position, so definitely a special place to me.”
The team knew that it would not be able to keep the big guns behind in the race, and after having had the buzz of leading away at the start (twice) Gasly slipped back to P7.
However still had Hamilton’s Ferrari in sight at the flag, and the best midfield rival – the Racing Bulls of Arvid Lindblad – was far behind.
“The part of me that is realistic is very satisfied,” said Gasly. “Basically, starting on pole, you must have a side of you which thinks, ‘Okay, what can happen over 53 laps, this and that?’
“But I’ve got to be honest – before the race, we knew that with the pace in the race it would be extremely difficult to stay up there and fight with the top guys.
“I’m very happy with the two starts. We took two great starts, managed to keep the lead on the first one, great on the second, battled slightly, stayed in the right train for the first 10 laps, which was really good.
“And we battled with Lando [Norris], who won the last two races.
“So from where we come from, it’s very positive, and I finished three seconds behind Lewis, who has been fighting for podium this year. So I’m not going to be disappointed with that.
“Obviously, the end result is P7, and you’ll wish you can get slightly more out of it. But I think overall we’ve just got to try to take all the positives from the weekend, because there were many and try to build from that.”
Red Bull: Second time unlucky for Lawson
After a superb race to P7 in Zandvoort Liam Lawson was handed a second opportunity to drive for Red Bull at Monza after a last minute test for Isack Hadjar in the Milton Keynes sim indicated that he was far from ready to return.
The catch for Lawson was that he would have to take a back of the grid penalty for new PU elements, which did at least mean that he could focus on race prep and on towing his teammate in qualifying.
Alas the weekend fell apart almost as a poorly executed (that word again) qualifying saw him only P13 after he was impeded by Piastri on his final lap.
Crucially that meant he wasn’t able to help Verstappen in Q3.
“It just wasn’t ideal,” Lawson rued. “We obviously left it to the end there to try and put a lap together.
“The tyres were pretty hot after just one cool, and then obviously not ideal, getting blocked at Turn One.
“The goal was to try and focus this weekend on the race anyway. Obviously, we’ve got the penalty for tomorrow, so yesterday we were very long run focussed anyway.
“I just spent the whole quali in clean air until that last lap – that was the first time I’d sat behind a car, and the tyres were super hot, and it just wasn’t an ideal situation.
“So trying to do it for the first time was not ideal. But I think obviously having Oscar in Turn One probably hurt me more than anything.”
He clearly wasn’t very happy: “We just had a plan, and in some ways, we didn’t really follow it exactly. I just felt at times I didn’t really know what I was what I was doing.
“But obviously, for us this weekend quali wasn’t really important for us. Hopefully we can have a strong race tomorrow.”
The team decided to make some changes and start Lawson from the pitlane. Over the two starts he made decent progress but a tangle with Nico Hulkenberg led to a stop for a new front wing, and from there it was a slog to an eventual P14 at the flag.
“I was taking the engine penalty the whole time, so we really focused on long runs,” he said.
“Obviously it’s not great, not ideal taking an engine. But I think we had the speed to come through, and we’d done all the work to have a good race car, which we did.
“It’s just unfortunate. I think we had some issues yesterday, which we were able to resolve today for the race, and the car was much better. But it’s trying to make up 30 seconds is very tough.”
F1 folk have short memories so it wasn’t what he needed after the Dutch GP performance – however he will have a third opportunity in Madrid this weekend, without penalties hanging over him.
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