Mark Hughes: McLaren F1 driver falls for Montreal trap... again

As Lando Norris, in trying to pass Oscar Piastri, hit the other McLaren‘s rear wheel and bounced hard into the pitwall, the parallels with the 2011 incident here between McLaren team-mates Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton were irresistible.

“Yes, I know,” sighed team boss Andrea Stella some hours after Sunday’s Montreal race. “But that’s not the sort of history we want to be repeating.”

Stella on that stormy Sunday back in 2011 — when the race was red-flagged once and saw six safety car periods — was race engineering Fernando Alonso‘s Ferrari. Fernando too was taken out by Button that day! Both Hamilton’s and Alonso’s retirements were deemed racing incidents. But there was nowhere near as much controversy and focus upon these moments as there was last Sunday upon the Piastri-Norris incident – probably because they’d happened relatively early in the four-hour race, before Button had transfixed everyone with a drive from the back to an unlikely victory, passing Sebastian Vettel‘s Red Bull on the last lap. That was such a sensation that it might have seemed churlish to have focused upon the early collisions.

Officially, Hamilton wasn’t attributing any blame to being squeezed into the pitwall by his team-mate as Lewis had tried – just like Lando last Sunday – to go by on the left rather than the more obvious right-hand side. “He probably hadn’t spotted me,” he said afterwards, before praising Button’s “utterly fantastic performance, from a truly great driver.” Privately, he might have wondered if Button really didn’t know he was there. But ultimately the accident was Hamilton’s fault. Button was just taking up his line.

It’s a layout that invites that exact incident. Although DRS didn’t play a part in the 2011 incident (it was during the wet phase and so wasn’t enabled), when the chaser gets a run on the defending car out of the final chicane, it’s not clear-cut what the best way past is going to be. Because not only does the left-right sequence of Turns 1-2 at the end of the straight give two possible routes to an overtake, but that sequence is preceded by a right-handed kink on the pit ‘straight’ approached nominally from the left.

So Norris, just like Hamilton before him, had been tempted by the space to the left as the shorter way around: “If you try for the right there, the outside, you’re probably not going to get past,” as Norris reasoned. But if you are going to try passing on the left, you need to be in the other guy’s vision before the point at which the lead car sweeps left to take up the approach line for the kink. Neither of them were.

With Norris, he stayed committed to the move even as Piastri was already beginning to ease gently left, perhaps hoping to intimidate him out of the way. Hamilton was caught out by how suddenly Button had swept left. He had less time to get out of the move than did Norris. In both cases, the lead driver was under no obligation to give room. The move of the chasing driver required the lead driver (Button and Piastri in each case) to cooperate and the lead driver is under no obligation to give that cooperation, regardless of whether they have seen the other car or not.

Which is why Norris immediately acknowledged his full culpability: “It was stupid of me,” as he radioed in.