Despite a safety car allowing Lando Norris a free pit stop as it picked up Verstappen at the head of the train rather than himself, the MCL38 genuinely had the pace to win the Grand Prix.
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The Woking squad brought 10 upgrades to Miami, and in Friday’s sprint qualifying it had the quickest car, until the capricious C4 soft tyres, which overheated if pushed even slightly too hard on the outlap, meant the two McLaren drivers started out of position and lead to a non-finish for Norris in the sprint.
In Qualifying for the race later on the car wasn’t as devastating as it had been on the medium the day prior and once again the soft was proving difficult over a lap. But as would be seen on Sunday, the McLaren came alive on the harder compounds.
Norris even said he sensed a “spark” with his machine since the start of the weekend.
How Norris had the pace
It wasn’t a straightforward race for the Brit. Sergio Perez almost barrelled into the back of his teammate at turn one, running Sainz wide allowing the sister McLaren of Piastri into third, which became second a few laps later as he passed Leclerc into the turn 17 hairpin.
This put Norris’s back in sixth, behind Perez and seemingly out of victory contention. However, it was this phase of the race which team principal Andrea Stella commended the most, as it set his driver up for later in the stint.
“His race management was very mature,” said Stella after the race. “As soon as he saw there wasn’t much to do after the first lap, he started to save his tyres because he knew this race would come.”
As long as you didn’t heat the surface of the tyres, which was the main limitation on the incredibly hot track, the tyres held their life for a very long time, thanks to Pirelli’s conservative choice of going for the middle range of compounds on such a low energy circuit.
This allowed Norris to stretch his stint until the safety car came out on lap 32 thanks to Kevin Magnussen sending Logan Sargeant spinning into the barrier on the exit of turn 3 at his home race.
The McLaren’s pace in free air once the Red Bull ahead had pitted was such that he began to close on the car’s ahead by over half a second a lap.
“I was very quick at the end of the first stint, I kept my head down and kept pushing,” said Norris.
“Everyone boxed from ahead of me and I could just use all the pace that I had which was a lot of it.”
It would have still been tough to win from that position without a bit of luck, as he’d have to pass the Ferrari’s, his teammate and Verstappen in a car that although Andrea Stella admitted was in a lower drag spec for the race thanks to the added downforce the upgrades bought, was still lagging behind in the top speed department.
Before the safety car was called, Verstappen made his stop in a reaction to Leclerc who was posing a slight undercut threat.
But, a couple of laps before, the reigning champion made a rare mistake, collecting the bollard at the turn 14-15 chicane and bringing out the VSC momentarily.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said the strike gave the RB20 “quite a lot of damage to the underside of the car,” something Verstappen disagreed with after the race, admitting that the balance of the car wasn’t where he wanted it to be, matching his sentiments from earlier in the weekend.
Controlling it to the finish
So, once Norris emerged as the leader at the head of the safety car train, all he had to do was fend off Verstappen at the restart and the win was there for the taking, as he had six lap fresher hards, and a clear car advantage.
He explained after the race how he was “rusty” when it came to safety car restarts. Verstappen had a look round the outside at turn one, but Norris held the inside well and pushed on to create a one second gap and escape DRS range.
Once he did that, using the MCL38’s pace advantage in the first sector, he settled down into a controlled drive, edging the gap out to 7.6s to cross the line as a winner for the first time in his F1 career.
It’s a huge weight off the 24-year-olds shoulders and redemption for the missed opportunities of Monza and Sochi in 2021, where if things had gone his way, he’d already been a Grand Prix winner.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Norris said while wiping the sweat from his forehead just moments after crowed surfing atop of his McLaren mechanics.
“Finally, I’ve managed to do it, I’m so happy for my whole team, I’ve finally delivered for them.”
He added: “The whole weekend has been good, there were some little setbacks along the way, but I knew on Friday we had the pace.
“I made some mistakes here and there, but today we managed to put it together, we did the perfect strategy, and it paid off.”
Norris said he was “proud” of his whole team and happy to prove the people who doubted him wrong, adding that he stuck with McLaren because he believed in them.
That belief has paid off in spades.