Miami blues for Norris and Hamilton

Pre-season, we hoped for a wide-open campaign with McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes all pitching in for victories race by race. It hasn’t turned out like that. Instead, McLaren is a clear cut or three above, with both World Championships at its mercy. In Miami, Piastri and Norris were more than half a minute up the road from George Russell’s Mercedes despite their delays in clearing an intransigent Max Verstappen.

But with one team – and specifically one driver –doing the lion’s share of the winning, we instead have an evolving team-mate duel for the World Title which is far from settled at this early stage, despite Piastri’s current superiority, and a web of delicately poised storylines developing within each team. One of which is vexation at Ferrari, which threatened to boil over in Miami as Hamilton and Charles Leclerc found themselves locked together in a no-man’s land of mediocrity.

Both Norris and Hamilton left Florida with fundamental questions hanging over them. For the former, has he really got the resilience to come up with a convincing answer to the increasingly solid challenge Piastri offering up? For the other, is there a path out of the grey mist that has descended over his Ferrari dream – or is this how it will be for the rest of a season that promised so much more?

Norris’ weaknesses exposed

How McLaren’s drivers dealt with Verstappen, the human Venus flytrap, is what made the Miami Grand Prix the most riveting race of the season so far. Once again, Red Bull’s four-time World Champion showed in adversity why he belongs among F1’s greats – and how venomous he is in combat. He’s nothing if not predictable.

A couple of days after the birth of his daughter, Verstappen batted away silly questions over going soft with another inspired pole position, with Norris, fresh from a lucky rain-affected sprint race win, lining up alongside him. It was bound to get messy given the confined, fiddly layout of the circuit around the Hard Rock Stadium, and so it proved. Verstappen slithered through the first turns, edging Norris over the borders at the second in the usual manner – right on the line of what’s deemed legitimate.

As he acknowledged later, Norris knew he had to go for it, despite the high risk of a negative outcome. “What can I say?” he said. “If I don’t go for it, people complain. If I go for it, people complain, so I can’t win. It’s the way it is with Max. It’s crash or don’t pass unless you get it really right and you put him in the perfect position, then you can just about get there. I paid the price for not doing a good enough job today.”

Accurate and, as usual, searingly honest. Norris dropped to sixth and handed the initiative (and ultimately the win) to Piastri in those hung-out-to-dry opening moments. But what else could he do?

As he worked his way past the excellent, high-flying Alex Albon and the Mercedes drivers to latch on to his team-mate and the leader, Piastri now faced the same thorny problem: how to engage the Venus flytrap and emerge without scars. Not the work of a moment – although how Oscar unlocked Verstappen’s defences by pressing him to brake too late into Turn 1, then executing a clinical switch-back pass, showed once more that the Dutchman has met his brilliant match in the Aussie. Now Piastri was free to scamper up the road – with Norris taking far too long to pick through the thorns.

The first attempt at Turn 11 took both the McLaren and Red Bull over the track limits, so Norris wisely handed the place back quickly. He tried again and this time succeeded, although perhaps even Verstappen had accepted by now that he’d shown enough belligerence for one day.

Norris later claimed Max “is not racing smart” in compromising his own race by fighting against the inevitable – but as we all know, it’s just not within him to play meekly. Verstappen is cut from the same cloth as Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Speaking of “racing smart,” Norris’ approach compared to Piastri highlighted alarming deficiencies in his racecraft. The team was coaching him from the pitlane, using Piastri’s example of how to clear Verstappen. Not a great look for the Brit.

Norris’s pure and natural speed edged him towards Piastri as the laps counted down, but there was never any likelihood of a tense intra-McLaren dogfight. Piastri had the measure of the situation and crossed the line 4.6 seconds ahead of his team-mate to increase his points advantage at the top of the table to 16. 

This is the first time a McLaren driver has won three in a row since the distant days of Mika Häkkinen, and the onus remains on Norris to change the narrative – quickly – as F1 returns to Europe for a triple header in Italy, Monaco and Spain.

Hamilton’s sarcasm rebukes Ferrari

Behind the McLarens, Russell drove another canny Grand Prix, cutting past Verstappen for a place on the podium with the aid of the race’s three Virtual Safety Car interruptions. Albon was quietly magnificent on his way to fifth as the pleasing Williams revival continues, and Kimi Antonelli delivered solid points for sixth in a weekend that promised so much more after he became the youngest F1 pole winner in the sprint.

Just outside the top six were the red cars, Leclerc finishing ahead of Hamilton, who just about held off a last-corner assault from Carlos Sainz Jr. Once the McLaren vs Verstappen cut and thrust had been resolved, much of the focus had turned to the tense Ferrari conundrum.

The Ferraris were on different tyre strategies, thanks once again to Hamilton qualifying poorly (just 12^th this time). Once he’d worked his way up the order, with familiar polished racecraft, inevitably the two Ferraris found themselves running line astern without a great deal of hope on how they’d make further progress. Seventh and eighth is just where the SF-25 is right now, it seems.

On better tyres, it was natural and right for Hamilton to call on Ferrari to order Leclerc to let him through and allow him to chase after Antonelli. “We’ll get back to you,” was the dithering response. No wonder exasperation and sarcasm crackled over the radio, Hamilton suggesting his team should “have a tea break while you’re at it” as the pitwall weighed up what to do. Eventually the order came, only for Hamilton’s progress to stall once he was past, with Leclerc now finding himself held up by his team-mate. Frustration simmered – but didn’t quite boil over into rage.

Luckily, there’s a strong seam of mutual respect running between Hamilton and Leclerc, and both are calling on their maturity to keep level heads in a time of intense pressure. They both acknowledged the position of the other when reflecting on the race, which is a good sign, and Hamilton in particular worked to dampen any sense of controversy.

Of course it gets spicy on the radio in the heat of the moment, he said, because he still has “the fire in my belly.” There was no “effing and blinding” as there would be with others (who on earth could he be referring to, we wonder?) and the language was conciliatory once the red mist had passed.

“I’m sure people didn’t like certain comments, but you’ve got to understand it was frustrating. People say way worse things than what I say,” said the seven-time Champion. “It was more sarcastic than anything and I’m not frustrated now. We’ll work internally, we’ll have discussions and we’ll keep pushing. Let’s not get emotional about it. We’re here to race, we’re not where we want to be.”

Third in the sprint was a small consolation for Hamilton, in a team that is failing to build on the promise shown in China. But amid the frustration, both drivers are showing a willingness to graft, to work their way out of the current malaise, and it appears that they will do it together.

All is not lost with so much of the season to come. That much is true for Norris as much as it is for Hamilton.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.