There was a time, just over a decade ago, when McLaren was the team to go to for any driver who wanted to aspire to win the Formula 1 World Championship. Fernando Alonso had a hunch after winning his first title with Renault (2005), even though his adventure with the Woking team ended in a shootout and the Spaniard fled to Renault in 2008, precisely the year in which Lewis Hamilton took the last crown that appears in the Technology team’s trophy cabinet. Since then, the British structure has been on a roller coaster ride that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the company to sell its majestic headquarters, a via crucifix from which it has now definitively emerged. And it has done so with a prodigious reputation that marks the path to follow for others. Without the muscle of Red Bull, Ferrari or Mercedes, McLaren has made the most of everything it has, which is no small feat, starting with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, the youngest and one of the most explosive pairings on the grid.
With Zak Brown’s neat method for squaring the numbers and Andrea Stella’s experience and know-how, the technicians have found the recipe to revitalise a papaya car that a year ago was nowhere, and which has now become the reference, even ahead of the almighty Red Bull and Max Verstappen, who started the year driving with one hand and now can’t compete with the two MCL38s with both. In Hungary, McLaren was so superior to the rest that it even allowed itself the luxury of making a mess of itself, with a bizarre strategy in the order of the second stop at the workshops, which caused a civil war between Piastri and Norris.
With 25 laps to go and the Australian comfortably at the front of the pack, the Briton, who was two seconds behind him, was called to the wall to supposedly protect him from an attack by Verstappen that never came to pass. This led Norris to the lead and his team to suggest, first, recommend, then order him, finally, to let his teammate pass again. Despite the insistence of the messages sent by the radio and the striking back and forth, the change of positions did not materialise until the penultimate lap, on the main straight and in a very obvious way, in what Piastri defined as an episode “too painful”. Thanks to a start to frame, which led him to steal the wallet from his neighbour in the workshop, the young driver from Melbourne opened his victory account, while Norris put the lock on McLaren’s first double in three years, the second in 14 years. This victory, moreover, makes Piastri the seventh different driver to win in the 13 Grand Prix so far this season, clear proof of the changing colour of the championship.
Lewis Hamilton rounded out the podium, the 200th in the multi-champion’s service record, while Verstappen finished fifth, in one of the most disastrous days that the Dutchman and the Red Buffalo brand can remember, which ended up scolding its flagship for insolent behaviour. Carlos Sainz finished fifth and Fernando Alonso, eleventh.
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