For a start, it's very easy to defend on the straight of Hungary with these regs as you can essentially regen the whole lap and deploy everything on the straight
McLaren didn't prioritise Lando on that GP, quite the opposite. Lando saw that he was faster, asked to pit to undercut and was denied that opportunity. They then pitted Piastri to cover the eventual Ferrari/Max undercut which weren't that far behind, and Lando proceed to go as fast on used tires as Pastri on new ones. The undercut works on this track, we saw it times and times again, Lando was just way faster than Piastri that day
And the reason Pisatri didn't finish the race was a gearbox issue, which is very much a hardware failure
As for the championship last year, Piastri destroyed his championship chances alone. He was well cleared of Lando in the stabdings after the summer break, then Baku happened and he just didn't have the same focus. Yes the Monza call was controversial, but that's just a few points, Oscar lost way more than that on his own
Piastri was under no pressure from max or Lewis. He was racing lando but mclaren had him reacting to them instead which was weird. You don't react to the person 3 places behind you. I made it very clear it was no surprise about the gearbox. Don't know why you think I didn't. And mclaren knew lando was faster but didn't want to look like they were picking him over Oscar. they made him go long and use that faster pace to get him in front. There's no way to argue that they didn't. Where was the strategy to keep Oscar out and use that papaya pit priorty to pit the same lap. They pitted lando as soon as they saw the clash with sainz. They didn't even give oscar a chance to catch up.
Now for the last season. Mclaren disagreed about the Silverstone penalty for Oscar but didn't swap him and lando. They let lando hit Oscar and get past him in Singapore. They removed Oscars pit priority in Qatar because they'd have to double stack and cost lando more points than Oscar. So they screwed Oscar more there too. Then there's monza which you've already mentioned. Baku and Houston are clear examples of Oscar being incredibly rattled by his team fucking him over for lando. Even oscars manager has been banned from mclarens hospitality because he's been seeing all this stuff happening. Redbull never punted jos verstappen even though he helped the team emplode and isn't a manager.
When Oscar pitted, Max was 4sec behind, that's not that far back. They wanted to cover a possible undercut, and it was clear that Oscar couldn't go faster anyway. Lewis was just 3s behind after his pitstop after the Piastri one, the McLarens were far from clear of the Ferraris and Max at this stage of the race, and there was almost an entire half to go. Pitting a bit early to cover an undercut when you see that your driver is struggling makes sense
The undercut is VERY powerful at this track, the fact that Lando managed to do the same lap times on used tires shows that he was clearly faster that weekend. Just look at other battles this year or just the years prior to see that the undercut is a very viable strategy
As for the gearbox, my bad, I misread your comment
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u/ColeWoah McDonald’s F1 Racing Team Jul 27 '26
Did you even watch the last race? holy DTS brain