Lando Norris’ anguish tells the story of both the F1 Spanish Grand Prix and the season

The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya has the longest distance from the start-finish line to the first corner of the entire F1 schedule. The distance from the pole position grid box to the first corner is 579 metres, a considerable distance to cover at the start of a Grand Prix.

Those 579 metres must have been on Lando Norris’ mind on Saturday night.

Starting first, Norris knew he had to catch Max Verstappen at the start of Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix. To beat Verstappen, he’d have to be perfect — or, as Norris so eloquently put it after snatching pole position from his rival on Saturday, “give it his all.” That meant catching Verstappen, one of the sport’s greatest drivers, in the first 579 meters and hanging in there from there.

After the lights went out, Norris couldn’t get past him no matter how hard he tried. Shortly after the start of the 2024 Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen was able to overtake his friend and rival Norris after a fierce race.

Their initial battle gave George Russell an opening, albeit briefly, as he overtook both drivers in a brilliant double overtake at the start to take an early lead in the race.

But Verstappen didn’t stay behind the Mercedes for long and, with some encouragement from race engineer Giampiero “GP” Lambiase, he overtook Russell himself for the lead on lap three.

It was his seventh Grand Prix win of the season.

But again he had to push. In the final stages of the race, Norris tried to close the gap again, extracting every last bit of rubber from his tyres, just as he had done a few weeks earlier at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. At Imola, he thought he might have caught his friend with one more lap, but he ended up losing by less than a second. In Barcelona, ​​Norris could only close the gap to around two seconds, and the McLaren driver was distraught when his team told him at the end of the race that he had finished second.

“I could have won,” Norris began, “but I messed up the start.”

But Norris’ struggles perhaps tell a bigger story about F1 this season: A year ago, finishing second, two seconds behind Verstappen, would have been considered a major win for any team – at this track a year ago, Verstappen won by more than 24 seconds.

This year, the gap was down to just two seconds.

Verstappen could win a fourth consecutive drivers’ championship, he could give Red Bull a third consecutive constructors’ title.

But this year he and Red Bull will have to work hard.

Here are the full results from the 2024 Spanish Grand Prix, plus other winners and losers.

Winner: McLaren

“Should have” instead of “could have”

That’s how Lando Norris spoke to David Coulthard trackside after the race about his efforts at the Spanish Grand Prix, insisting that not only could he have won the race, but that he should have.

Once again, this struggle highlights just how much the game has changed in F1 this season.

Norris may be regretting his start to the Spanish Grand Prix. As mentioned above, he faced the biggest challenge on the calendar, maintaining his lead on the long run to the first corner of Barcelona. Norris gave it his all, even going so far as to push Verstappen up the inside in an incident which was investigated by race officials, but no further action was taken as it was an opening lap race incident. But in the end, Verstappen was just too strong.

This day. But future races may be different.

“Austria and Silverstone are my two favourite tracks,” Norris added to Coulthard, “and if we just improve a little bit we can be at the top.”

Still, it was another strong day for McLaren. Norris maintained his streak as the only driver to score points in every Grand Prix this season, and his 18 points (including the bonus point for fastest lap of the race) plus Oscar Piastri’s six for seventh place gave McLaren 25 points for the day, seven more than the 18 taken home by Ferrari thanks to Charles Leclerc’s fifth place and Carlos Sainz Jr.’s sixth place.

McLaren are battling for second place in the constructors’ championship and are just a few points closer to the Scuderia.

Loser: C1 Hard Compound

Photo by Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the game of F1 tyre strategy, there was a clear loser this Sunday: the C1 compound, designated by Pirelli as the ‘hard’ compound for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.

During the run-up to the Spanish Grand Prix, a two-stop strategy was highlighted as the ideal route for teams, although that potential strategy often involved the use of variations of soft and medium tyres. F1TV —Sauber’s head of race strategy turned analyst F1TV The coverage has been significantly increased. Given the surface at Barcelona, ​​the drivers will want to use the softest compound possible towards the end of the race, otherwise they won’t have the grip they need.

However, the two teams in the running for the win, Mercedes led by George Russell and Ferrari led by Carlos Sainz Jr., were betting on the C1 tyre.

Both drivers were eventually overtaken by their teammates on the soft tyre, with Charles Leclerc overtaking Sainz for fifth place and Lewis Hamilton overtaking Russell, who was on the soft tyre, to complete the podium.

Further back, some teams tried to extend the distance on the hard tyres in the hope that something would work, only to see the tyres weaken towards the end of their runs.

In case you’re wondering, the C1 hard compound will not be used at next weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, as Pirelli has already identified three compounds for that race weekend: C3, the softest compound at Barcelona, ​​will be the hard compound at the Red Bull Ring, C4 will be the medium and C5 the soft.

However, at Silverstone, the C1, C2 and C3 are due to run again.

This gives C1 two weeks to think about what he has done…

Winner: Mercedes

“It was a good day,” Lewis Hamilton told David Coulthard after the race.

Sunday was a very good day for Mercedes, as the Silver Arrows started the Spanish Grand Prix monopolizing the second row, with Lewis Hamilton in third and George Russell in fourth.

Thus, they took home 27 points for the weekend, another solid win for the team.

There’s been talk of “progress” from the team going all the way back to the Miami Grand Prix, where Mercedes began rolling out its series of upgrades to its 2024 W15 car. But over the past two race weekends, that progress has been fully realized: Russell finished third at the Canadian Grand Prix, marking the team’s first Grand Prix podium of the season, while Hamilton claimed his first Grand Prix podium of the season in Barcelona, ​​marking the second consecutive podium for the Brackley-based team. (Hamilton finished second in the F1 sprint race at the Chinese Grand Prix in April.)

Speaking with Coulthard, the seven-time drivers’ champion praised the team’s efforts: “I want to say a massive thank you to the team, they’ve been training really hard, the strategy and the pit stops were absolutely flawless,” Hamilton said.

Sunday’s result moves Mercedes two points behind McLaren and nine behind Ferrari in the constructors’ championship standings, and while there is still a long way to go this season, there is reason to believe Mercedes can translate this progress into performance and ultimately the standings.

Loser: Aston Martin

Aston Martin has kept expectations low all week after Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll were both eliminated in Q2 during Saturday’s qualifying. Team principal Mike Clack explained: It was “…the best car out there today”, meaning a podium was probably out of the question and points were the only achievable goal.

A goal that was not achieved on Sunday.

By the time the chequered flag waved, both drivers were out of the points, with Stroll in 14th place and local hero Alonso a few places up in 12th.

Aston Martin is slowly working its way back to where Alpine was last season, fast enough to not pose a real threat to the teams at the back of the midfield, but too far behind the leaders. They head to the Red Bull Ring 93 points behind fourth-placed Mercedes, and given the Silver Arrows’ recent form, this gap is likely to widen over the next two races.

Fortunately for Aston Martin, their closest rivals VCARB also struggled and were unable to close the 30 points that separate the two teams.

Still, things have certainly changed this season after Aston Martin became the talk of the paddock with its impressive start to the 2023 season.

Winner: Alpine

Speaking of Alpine…

Despite their best efforts, the French team started the year without scoring a single point in five consecutive races.

However, after their breakthrough at the Miami Grand Prix where Esteban Ocon finished 10th and scored their first points of the year, the team has now scored points in four of the last five race weekends in what the driver described as a sign that they are “…heading in the right direction.” Not only did Alpine add to their points this weekend, but both Ocon and Pierre Gasly scored points (Ocon 10th, Gasly 9th), making it a second consecutive double points finish for the team.

As the grid leaves Barcelona they are 20 points behind Red Bull’s sister team VCARB, so they still have a long way to go to catch up with them in the standings, but this graph shows Formula 1 Points That explains the uptrend in Alpine shares in recent weeks.

Can they keep that momentum going against Austria and through the rest of the season?

It will truly be a comeback story.