No, Piastri was not ‘dudded’ in the Hungary F1 race

Yet again the Australian media goes for the clickbait emotion mining angle.

I don’t know if their writers don’t understand F1, or they do and they just want the clicks. Either way, this take is wrong.

F1 races depend on strategy as well as outright speed. The tyre supplier, Pirelli, brings three different compounds of tyre to each race designated Soft, Medium and Hard. As you’d expect the soft tyre has the most grip but least life, the hard the least grip but longest life. Every driver is obliged to use at least two of the compounds which means at least one pit stop.

This means teams need to make decisions; which of the two compounds will they run, and how many stops? Every time a driver stops that takes 20-30 seconds…so is it better to stop just once during a race and take one 20 second hit, but then need to eke out your tyre life, or stop twice for say 40 seconds in total, and then plan to make up that time running quicker on softer tyres, not needing to worry about wearing them out?

It is a complex decision and only ever an estimate from the teams. Often opinion is split one way or the other, but a decision needs to be made regardless. There’s a lot more to it than the brief explanation above, but it’ll do to set the scene.

In the latest F1 race in Hungary Piastri qualified second behind Ferrari’s Leclerc, Norris third. Off the line that’s the way they stayed, Norris making a good start to pull alongside Piastri, who squeezed him over to the right. That compromised Norris nicely, who was shuffled back to fifth through Turn 1, and Piastri retained second.

This left Norris with a problem; the Hungarong track is not easy to overtake on. Piastri was going for the favoured two-stop strategy, so Norris went for a one-stop. Why? Because he had nothing to lose. If the one-stop worked better relative to the leaders he could maybe work up to 4th, 3rd or better. If it didn’t….then he probably would still remain 5th, maybe 6th but going from 5th to 6th isn’t as much of a points difference as going from 6th to 3rd.

So it made sense for Norris to try something different, and this is very frequently done by drivers in his situation. The drivers up front have more to lose, and tend to take more conservative strategies.

So what happened in the race? The one-stop strategy worked, just, for Norris who did well to manage his tyres on long stints between stops. Happily for him, Leclerc had pace problems so dropped well back, leaving a straight fight for the win between the two McLarens. Piastri, stopping twice, used his fresher tyres in the closing stages of the race to catch Norris but was unable to pass despite an attempt into Turn 1.

So that’s all it was, just a quite normal split strategy, something we’ve seen many, many times before. There was no dudding of Piastri, no conspiracy against him or Australian drivers generally…it’s just the way F1 works. Ironically, had Piastri not so successfully squeezed Norris on the run down to Turn 1 he would have been third not fifth, and therefore may not have gambled on what turned out to be a good strategy!