Brundle's verdict on Piastri's win, Ferrari 'pain' after disqualifications

Sprint weekends are always full-on for everyone, there’s a real urgency to procedures from Friday morning until Sunday evening. Shanghai was no different, and if anything that relentless nature was intensified as the pack was so close, and it’s early in the season for many new driver and team combos.

By a small margin McLaren were once again the team to beat, but on a very smooth and grippy new surface which would yield a pole position time three seconds faster than last year, delivering the optimum lap didn’t prove easy for any of the drivers.

Mandatory minimum tyre pressures were high due to the high aerodynamic loads in the 270-degree first turn which also incorporates Turns two and three. And also Turns 12 and 13 onto the long back straight.

For a qualifying lap the drivers needed to hang around a little in the pitlane and the pit-out lap to let temperatures and therefore pressures drop down, not least because the minimum pressures were raised again by one psi front and rear overnight on Friday. This voodoo and imprecise process lead to a lot of variability.

Hence we had the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton and the Red Bull of Max Verstappen on the front row for the 19-lap Sprint, and the McLaren of Oscar Piastri and Mercedes of George Russell on the front row of the 56-lap race. Variability was the name of the game in Shanghai.

Vintage Hamilton in the Sprint

The Sprint was vintage Hamilton controlling the race from pole position, managing his tyre graining out front better than others, and tucking away very early doors his first victory for Ferrari. After the previous weekend in Melbourne which he called “disastrous”, this was the perfect antidote, and remarkably the first time either he or Ferrari had won a Sprint.

Piastri would wrestle his way through to a fine second place by overtaking a very fair and compliant Verstappen, as everybody was struggling with badly-marked-up tyres which were graining heavily. It’s a process where the lateral grip is so high that it tears the surface compound and makes the tyre slide, which further exacerbates the problem.

Championship leader Lando Norris had one of his occasional unforced errors and ran wide on the opening lap, and would only salvage a point in eighth place. The McLaren is clearly fast but a little on the knife edge to drive.

These days the teams are allowed to make changes before Saturday afternoon qualifying in order to attempt to improve their cars for both speed and tyre management. And many seemed pretty successful at that.

The great unknown for race day would be the performance of the hard compound tyre. On Sprint weekends, despite there being an extra qualifying session and a further mini race, each driver is allocated 12 rather than 13 sets of dry tyres for the weekend.

And only two of those are the hard compound which nobody wants to try beforehand and waste a set, along with giving everybody else useful information free of charge. This was especially pertinent given how awful the medium tyres looked in the Sprint in terms of graining.

Teams changed race strategy on the go

Qualifying for the main race looked like a straight duel between Piastri and Norris at McLaren, which the young Aussie looked like he might always ace. And indeed he did, but a different out-lap strategy and a fine lap slotted Russell’s Merc between them and onto the front row.

The weather in Shanghai had unusually been delightful all through the event and Sunday was no different, if a little more cloudy come the race. Off the start Piastri pinned the slightly faster-starting Russell towards the pit wall such that George’s entry into the high speed Turn One was compromised. This allowed Norris to sweep around the outside and seize second place in great team play.

Verstappen’s Red Bull snapped sideways and this allowed the Ferraris of Hamilton and Leclerc to seize the opportunity. Leclerc took a speedy tight line but would bounce off the serrated inside kerb and slide into his team-mate, breaking off the side fence of his front wing, which then proceeded to drag along the ground at speed, but luckily not puncturing Hamilton’s tyre.

Surprisingly, Leclerc would settle down despite this impediment, which was not changed at his pit stop, to be the fastest of the two Ferraris and Lewis would eventually let him through. It was a very feisty effort from Leclerc who must have hurt watching Hamilton take the Sprint victory 24 hours earlier. As it turned out, it would all be in vein.

It was expected to be a two-stop race, medium/hard/hard, for an optimum glorious victory. Three drivers in the second half of the field tried a contrary strategy, and why not, by starting on the hard tyres. The early signs were that this mystery tyre was working well but it was confusing as Liam Lawson pitted his Red Bull to park the hard tyres on Lap 18, Ollie Bearman in the Haas on Lap 26, and Lance Stroll in his Aston Martin got to Lap 36 of the scheduled 56 laps.

With pace management on their medium tyres, the leaders started pitting for the first time on Lap 14. Because McLaren were running a reasonably close one and two, Norris had to wait until Lap 15 and this put him behind Russell again. Another overtake was required and which was duly delivered in style with some hard racing heading into Lap 18, re-establishing the McLaren one-two.

These tyres looked good and it began to dawn on teams that, against all expectations, they could make it to the end of the race without another pit stop which takes 23 seconds, if all goes well.

McLaren are on a roll

It was about now that we remembered Verstappen was in the race as he started to find some grip. Somehow on lower fuel, or simply track conditions, and probably even the realisation that he didn’t need to babysit the tyres so much, this allowed him to catch the Ferraris. In fact Max would deliver his fastest and front-running lap time on the final tour, which is a bit confusing.

Hamilton was pitted as there was nothing much to lose except putting him behind Verstappen but on much better tyres. Lewis would then push hard to the end of the race, a factor which may well have contributed to his eventual disqualification.

The big question now was whether the hard tyre really could do 42 laps or more, and the answer was a resounding yes. Piastri in his usual understated way described them as “better than expected”.

Anybody who two-stopped such as Hamilton and the two Racing Bulls of Isack Hadjar and Yuki Tsunoda were not rewarded.

Another question was whether Norris could mount a challenge on his team-mate and championship rival Piastri, but a disappearing brake pedal which became virtually non-existent on the final lap put paid to that, and Norris did well to just hold off Russell having another good day for Mercedes.

It was the 50th one-two in McLaren’s history and they really are on a roll these days.

There was some fairly desperate racing, blocking, and overtaking going on down the field, not least by Liam Lawson and Jack Doohan who are in many ways unfairly feeling exposed in their drives so early in the season. There could well be changes.

For the second successive race Fernando Alonso wouldn’t finish, this time due to a rear brake issue.

Pain for Ferrari after miscalculation

The sting in the tail was the post-race disqualification of both Ferraris and Pierre Gasly’s Alpine. Leclerc and Gasly were thrown out due to being marginally underweight. Rather like we saw last year in Spa with George Russell, a long run on one set of tyres uses up a few kilos of tyre tread. Also the race pace was strong and there were no Safety Cars, and so fuel usage was high, consuming more mass. Leclerc’s broken front wing was allowed to be replaced but he was still underweight. Which ever way you cut it, that’s a miscalculation by the team to not leave enough margin for all circumstances.

Hamilton’s car was thrown out for running too close to the ground and overly wearing away the legality skid block underneath by half a millimetre. This rule is in place to stop teams running these ground-effect aero cars too low to gain performance but then trashing super expensive floors every day.

Especially in the Italian media, it will be painful reading for Ferrari this week despite the Sprint victory.

Kimi Antonelli picked up some floor damage with debris on the first lap and had a relatively quiet but solid race to what would eventually be sixth place after the disqualifications. The fans knew something we didn’t as he was voted driver of the day.

Others to gain places post-race were Verstappen, Esteban Ocon and Bearman for Haas, Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz for Williams, and Lance Stroll for Aston Martin who all inherited more points.

Norris leaves China with one more point advantage over Verstappen in the championship than before he arrived, but more ominously for him, Piastri is now only 10 points behind. Next up is Suzuka. It’s going to get intense between the McLaren pairing.

Formula 1 heads to the iconic Suzuka Circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix on April 4-6, live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – No contract, cancel anytime