When Sunday broke at Lusail International Circuit, McLaren looked in position to clinch the Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship. A front-row lockout from Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris in the F1 Sprint Race on Saturday increased their lead over Ferrari to 30 points, putting them 15 points away from the title.
As the laps ticked down in the Qatar Grand Prix, McLaren inched closer still to that trophy. With both Norris and Piastri running at the front of the field, they were in striking distance of their first title since 1998.
Then, everything changed.
Norris was hit with a severe ten-second, stop-and-go penalty for failing to slow down under a double yellow flag, a penalty that dropped him from contending for the win to the back of the field. While he recovered well enough in the closing laps to finish tenth — and pick up a bonus point for the fastest lap of the race — and Piastri took the final podium spot, McLaren fell short of clinching the title.
Instead, with Charles Leclerc finishing second, and Carlos Sainz Jr. delivering a strong recovery drive of his own to finish sixth, Ferrari outscored McLaren 26-17 on Sunday, closing the gap between the two teams to just 21 points.
This means the title will be decided in the season finale, next week’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
It was a result that surprised even Leclerc.
“I’m really happy. I mean, honestly, I would have signed straight away if I had a paper that told me that we will finish second after a weekend like this, especially on a track like this, because our car characteristics are not fitting very well with this track,” said Leclerc trackside to David Coulthard after the race. “And we knew it was going to be a very difficult weekend compared to the McLaren, but at the end, we managed to take some points away from them. So, yeah, the fight will be all the way to the last race in Abu Dhabi next week.”
Can Ferrari pull out the title in the season’s final act?
Leclerc believes that Yas Marina could be a better track for the team.
“Well, it’s difficult to say. To be honest, I haven’t even seen the numbers yet. So we’ve got to wait and see. But I feel like on paper, it should be a bit more positive than Qatar was,” said Leclerc in the FIA Press Conference after the race Sunday. “Because on race pace… Again, today we’ve been quite lucky, but without what happened to Lando, we would have been very, very far off. And without the Safety Car, we would have been very far off. In terms of race pace, we weren’t fast. So I feel like… Yeah, Abu Dhabi should be better for us. So I hope so. But we’ll wait and see. But it’s not too many points between us. So we’ve just got to focus on ourselves and try to maximise everything. And hopefully we’ll bring back the title to Maranello.”
Here are some more winners, and losers, from the Qatar Grand Prix.
Winner: Max Verstappen
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Photo by Mohammed Dabbous/Anadolu via Getty Images
If you wanted to make the case that 2024 was Max Verstappen’s best season yet, the Qatar Grand Prix gave you a lot of evidence for that argument.
Verstappen’s weekend got off to a difficult start, as he qualified sixth for the F1 Sprint Race on Friday, and finished eighth in the F1 Sprint Race itself early on Saturday.
Following those sessions, Verstappen described the car as “undriveable.”
Then, thanks to some changes the team made to the suspension on the RB20, the car came alive in Verstappen’s hands. He captured pole position ahead of George Russell, and while he did not start there, thanks to a one-place grid penalty handed down after qualifying, Verstappen quickly snatched the lead after the start from Russell and did not look back.
The Red Bull driver called it one of the biggest swings he has seen in the sport.
“It’s probably been one of the biggest, yeah, where you’re fighting Haas in the sprint to fighting for the win in the main race,” said Verstappen in the FIA Press Conference. “So, yeah, it’s been quite a big swing in performance.”
While Red Bull was eliminated from the Constructors’ title race on Sunday, it was another impressive performance from Verstappen.
In what might be his most impressive season yet.
Losers: McLaren
McLaren went from locking down the Constructors’ Championship to hoping they can hold onto the title next weekend in Abu Dhabi.
Such are the swings that sports can offer teams, and their fans, on a given day. Sunday began with McLaren on the cusp of their first title since 1998, a title that seemed well within their grasp past the halfway point of the Qatar Grand Prix. On Lap 31 both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were running in the top three, results that would have secured a championship for the team.
Then a few laps later, everything changed. Valtteri Bottas drove over a rear-view mirror that had flown off Alexander Albon’s FW46 — and come to rest on the main straight for multiple laps — setting in motion a series of events that included a pair of safety cars, a ten-second stop-and-go penalty for Norris, and a title fight that will come down to the final weekend.
To be clear, a penalty was warranted in this case, as Norris conceded in his comments following the race. Whether the penalty was proportional can be debated, but as you can see here Norris did commit the infraction of failing to slow under a double yellow flag:
Norris managed a stellar recovery from there, as he rebounded from the penalty which dropped him to P15 to finish tenth and pick up a bonus point for the fastest lap of the race in the process. As for Piastri, he managed to hold on for the final podium spot, a result that mitigated the damage done by Norris’ penalty.
But instead of celebrating Sunday night, everyone at McLaren was left to look ahead to next weekend, in hopes that they can put the finishing touches on what has been a strong season for the team.
Otherwise, it will be a long, cold winter in Woking.
Winners: Alpine
If you would have told an Alpine fan following pre-season testing — heck, if you would have told either Pierre Gasly or Esteban Ocon — that with one race remaining they would be sitting sixth in the Constructors’ Championship, they would have looked at you in disbelief.
But that is exactly where they sit heading into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Gasly delivered yet another stunning result in a final act of the season filled with them for Alpine, finishing fifth to bank ten critical points for the team. That was enough to push Alpine back into sixth place, a position they lost last weekend at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
“It was an incredible race today to finish in fifth place and I’m very happy for all the team,” said Gasly in the team’s post-race report. “I felt like we managed the race well right from the beginning. It was a tough start but we had the pace to stay with Kevin [Magnussen] and once he pitted it was flat out for us lap after lap. In the end, with the Safety Car, we pitted for Hards and then had to keep Carlos [Sainz] behind all the way until the chequered flag. It was certainly an enjoyable race, the car felt good, we were competitive and I was quite confident to hang on to that fifth place. We go into the final round in the fight for the Constructors’ Championship and we have to be ready for it.”
Team Principal Oliver Oakes made it clear: Sixth is now their goal.
“It was a well-managed and well executed race by the entire team today to score ten points in fifth place with Pierre,” said Oakes in the team’s post-race report. “The race was incredibly fast paced with a lot of action up and down the field. Pierre did well to stay in the pack in the hunt for points early on and then benefitted with the timing of the Safety Car, like many others, for his mandatory stop. He did an even better job to keep Carlos [Sainz] at bay for fifth place all while managing the tyres and doing some fuel saving. Importantly, we go to the season ending race in sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship with a small advantage and the target has to be to remain in that position.”
Interestingly enough, the team will have a different lineup for the season finale. Alpine confirmed rumors on Monday morning that they were replacing Ocon with Jack Doohan for the season finale, which will allow the veteran driver to participate in the post-season test with Haas following the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. That means that Alpine will give Doohan a full race weekend to make his F1 debut, albeit as the team fights to hold on to sixth in the Constructors’ Championship.
Still, to see Alpine fighting for sixth right now, given where they started the year, is evidence of a stunning turnaround from the team.
Losers: VCARB
Following the Singapore Grand Prix, Visa Cash App RB F1 Team was sitting sixth in the Constructors’ Championship, three points ahead of Haas and 21 points ahead of Alpine.
Since then, they have seen both teams overtake them in the Constructors’ Championship, sliding VCARB down into P8 ahead of the final race of the season. They sit on 46 points at the moment, 13 points behind Alpine, and 8 points behind Haas.
Sunday was another difficult evening for the team, as both Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson finished outside the points. With both Pierre Gasly and Kevin Magnussen banking points for their rivals in the fight for sixth, VCARB slid even further back in that three-way battle.
“It’s been a very difficult weekend in terms of our performance level, right from practice on Friday. It is clear that we never had the pace we needed around this track. With the whole field being so close, if you are just a few tenths off your optimal level, you drop down the order significantly,” said Team Principal Laurent Mekies following the race.
They have one race weekend remaining to emerge victorious in this three-way fight, but it might take something special for VCARB to pull off a P6 when the season draws to a close.
Winners: Sauber
Finally.
After 22 race weekends, Sauber finally secured their first points of the 2024 season. Zhou Guanyu crossed the line eighth, bringing home four hard-earned points for the team to break their scoreless streak.
Zhou earned Driver of the Day honors for his performance.
But if you wanted to see just what his drive meant to the team, sometimes a video is worth more than what one writer can do:
Absolute scenes.
Losers: FIA
Regardless of the sport, if you are spending the hours and days following a contest talking more about the officiating than you are the actual athletes involved, there might be a problem.
As this Monday begins, the decisions made by race officials in Qatar remain a focal point of the post-race discussion.
That discussion began on Saturday, when Max Verstappen was forced to surrender pole position after being given a one-place grid penalty for driving slowly during Q3, in front of George Russell. Verstappen not only questioned the penalty — because he noted that he was on a slow lap, as was Russell — he also blasted the Mercedes driver on Sunday, noting that he “lost all respect” for Russell due to his conduct during the post-qualifying hearing.
Then came the Grand Prix itself, which saw severe penalties handed down to both Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton, the one for the McLaren driver potentially having ramifications for the Constructors’ Championship. While Norris conceded that he had made a mistake, McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella questioned the proportionality of Norris’ ten-second, stop-and-go penalty. It is worth noting that those penalties were set in motion when Valtteri Bottas drove over a rear-view mirror that had fallen off Alexander Albon’s FW46 and allowed to remain on the track for multiple laps, causing some to wonder if intervention should have come from the race officials sooner to remove the mirror from the track.
These penalty decisions also did not come in a vacuum, as they occurred in a season filled with questionable decisions. There was the penalty handed down to Norris at the United States Grand Prix for an incident with Verstappen in the closing laps, as well as numerous other penalties throughout the season, all of which led drivers and teams alike to ask for more consistency from race officials.
Then there is the fact that these decisions are coming amidst a period of turmoil at the FIA, the sport’s governing body. Four senior figures have left the FIA in recent weeks, including former F1 race director Niels Wittich, who was replaced by Rui Marques. Marques was formerly the F2 race director and looked to be leaving that role, Janette Tan, the deputy Formula 2 race director who was assuming that role, has also left the FIA in recent weeks.
Meaning Marques was pulling double duty.
Tim Mayer, another senior race steward who was let go by the FIA after 15 years, told BBC Sport that F1 is “running out of people to do those jobs.”
“There aren’t a lot of ‘platinum-level’ FIA race directors, which is the FIA’s highest level certification. I’m one of them. It’s a lot of work and, if you are doing the job right, you wake up every day with an ulcer thinking of all the various things you need to be thinking about,” said Mayer.
“They’re not doing themselves any favors. They are literally running out of people to do those jobs.”
For years F1 fans — and even some senior figures within the sport — have been clamoring for full-time stewards.
Regardless of how this season ends, expect those calls to continue.
Winner: Kevin Magnussen
The Qatar Grand Prix was not just the penultimate F1 race of the 2024 season.
It may also be the penultimate F1 race of Kevin Magnussen’s career.
Magnussen learned earlier this season that Haas would be forging ahead with Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon next season. While an opportunity could come his way in the future, at 32 Magnussen could be seeing his time in single-seater racing draw to a close.
But he delivered a strong performance for Haas on Sunday, finishing ninth to bank two critical points for Haas as they look to finish sixth in the Constructors’ Championship.
And he did so in vintage Magnussen style, delivering this outburst as he overtook Alexander Albon in the closing stages (note, the audio is not exactly safe for work, so maybe put some headphones on if you are watching at work or with the kids around):
Tremendous.
Winners: Abbi Pulling
Traditionally, winners and losers in these pieces have been limited to F1 teams and drivers. But there have been some worthy exceptions to that rule.
Abbi Pulling is certainly a worthy exception.
Heading into the 2024 single-seater season many believed that we would see another dominating performance in the ranks. We did get one, but it was not the one we expected from Red Bull and Max Verstappen. Instead, it came via Pulling, who commanded the F1 Academy season from start to finish.
Pulling clinched the F1 Academy Drivers’ title on Saturday at the Qatar Grand Prix, finishing second behind Mercedes driver Doriane Pin. But that was all Pulling needed to clinch the Championship, and with just two races remaining in the F1 Academy schedule, Pulling has won 7 of the 11 races on the schedule. Her worst finish this season? That was a P3 at the Dutch Grand Prix.
She delivered a podium finish in every race so far this year.
Two races remain on the F1 Academy schedule, so it remains to be seen how her year finishes, but let there be no doubt: Pulling has a bright future in the motorsports world.
