We’re officially in curse territory.
This was the 39th running of the Australian Grand Prix. Prior to Sunday, the race had gone 38 years without an Australian finishing on the podium, never mind winning the thing.
Oscar Piastri was to be the man to break the home-race streak. After qualifying on the front row and pressuring teammate Lando Norris for the lead halfway through the race with what appeared to be better pace and greater confidence, it was inconceivable that Melbourne wouldn’t be celebrating one of its own breaking the hoodoo.
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But those hopes ended in the grass at the exit of the penultimate corner, Piastri felled by his home city’s notoriously variable weather.
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“Honestly, I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Obviously it was a mistake from me, but I think for it to have the consequences it did was a little bit unfortunate.
“I’ve only got myself to blame — I tried to push too much in those conditions. The other 56 and three-quarter laps were very strong.
“I’m obviously disappointed.”
Despite his in-car heartbreak, Piastri stormed home to pick up a pair of points whose value is untold ahead of a presumed title-challenging season.
But that score was far from the only positive for McLaren and its Aussie charger this weekend.
Hamilton’s spiky exchanges with Ferrari | 02:42
MCLAREN REVEALS ITS HAND — AND IT’S CAUSE FOR ALARM FROM RIVALS
McLaren tried hard — really hard — to give the impression that it wasn’t going to have a comfortable advantage this weekend.
The cracks in its story began emerging in qualifying, when pole-getter Norris was 0.4 seconds quicker than the next-best car of Max Verstappen.
The race blew its story apart.
While wet weather does put an asterisk on results, the team’s pace in the first stint was extremely impressive.
In the 16 laps between Piastri getting past Verstappen and the mid-race safety car the McLaren teammates extended their lead over the Dutchman by 13.4 seconds, an advantage of nearly 0.85 seconds per lap.
Formidable. Foreboding. Call it what you want, it’s big.
Team principal Andrea Stella said it was unexpectedly strong validation of a key trait the team had worked on during the off-season.
“We wanted to improve from a mechanical point of view and the interaction with the tyres,” he said of his 2025 development goals.
“Today we saw that the car interacts with the tyres very well, because in the first stint we were able to open a gap to the other cars which I don’t think is the car itself only; it’s also how gentle the car is on the tyres.
“I think in a way this is a little bit of a surprise for us as to how competitive the car is, but it’s a surprise in terms of the extent; it’s not a surprise in terms of the objectives.
“The car seems to have achieved some of the objectives that we gave ourselves.”
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It’s becoming clear that McLaren has done an excellent job revolutionising last year’s title winner, and it’s becoming more difficult for Stella and others at the team to deny it.
The Italian manager even admitted the last five laps were close only because Norris’s car was carrying damage that left him down on aerodynamic performance. Presumably it would’ve been a straightforward romp otherwise.
Aside from massively shortening McLaren’s odds of defending its constructors title, it also increases the chances of the drivers championship being an exclusive duel between Norris and Piastri, who were closely matched all weekend. Only Piastri’s mistake as the late rain arrived — almost identical to Norris’s error but carrying greater consequences — cost him a shot at victory.
“[Oscar] will have many satisfactions this year, because he’s fast and the car seems to be fast,” Stella said in another small admission that the team knows it’s the frontrunner.
Melbourne isn’t a typical track, and nor was the weather representative of the year generally, but there’s no moving past McLaren’s big advantage as the key takeaway from round 1.
Shattered Piastri takes full blame | 02:23
MCLAREN STARTS IN BEST POSSIBLE WAY
Melbourne served up the best possible sort of opening race, ladened with meaning and significance for the season ahead.
For McLaren it was particularly meaningful, and not just because of the performance of its car.
This was a race — indeed a race weekend — that proved many of the team’s 2024 weaknesses had been eliminated.
Piastri’s big average qualifying deficit to Norris was practically eliminated, the difference between them clocking in at less than 0.1 seconds.
Both drivers got strong starts, even if Piastri lost a place to Max Verstappen after being pinned onto the slipper stuff on the fringes of turn 1-2.
Team communication was clear, even if it was mildly controversial.
Perhaps most importantly, though, was the solid way the team judged the changing weather, with both Norris and his pit wall in particular getting as close to possible as nailing the timing of the switch from slicks back to intermediates.
It simply wouldn’t have happened in 2024. In fact it didn’t.
“We got it wrong a lot last year,” Norris said. “We lost out on Silverstone and Canada through a races [in conditions] like this. We’ve learned from our mistakes.
“We worked a lot over the winter to prepare for a race like this because it’s where we threw away a lot of opportunities last season, where we were not the best at preparing and knowing how decisive we’ve got to be.
“We didn’t nail the strategy [last season]. We knew we had to improve in certain areas. There’s been a lot of work on trying to make sure we’re snappier and better with communication.
“Today we were very decisive. I was calling to box [for intermediates] five minutes before I boxed, but it was the right call in the end, and that won us the race.”
Wet weather is particularly tough for a driver in the lead, who experiences changes in conditions first. Following drivers can make calculate gambles based on the leader’s actions and react accordingly, sometimes winning big.
It put Norris and the team under more pressure to get their calls right.
I was making sure the guys on the pit wall and everyone back in mission control at [the McLaren Technology Centre] were aware of what was going on, making sure we were on top of it, ready to make the right call,” he said.
“That right call was made literally half a second before I boxed, as I was still trying to save the car and didn’t shunt.
“It was more about relaying information and making sure we’re not overdoing it, a good amount of information, giving them my feelings.
“I owe them a lot of credit today because they’ve put in a lot of time and effort over the winter. It’s not just about driving a car quickly on a day like today; strategy is a big part of it too.”
McLaren has a quick car and quick drivers. On the evidence of one race — though it’s as tough a race strategically as any team’s likely to face this year — it passed with flying colours.
Piastri executes EPIC overtake on Lewis! | 00:46
ANTONELLI RISES TO THE TOP AS OTHER ROOKIES FALL OFF
Over last year and into the pre-season a ranking of the rookies by paddock consensus had formed. The results from qualifying were pretty much that order upside down.
It was particularly surprising to see Andrea Kimi Antonelli knocked out in Q1 in his Mercedes, even if a damaged car was partly to blame. The 18-year-old Italian is the highest rated rookie in the field — the highest rated rookie in years — and is expected to get himself quickly up to speed.
The race, run in extremely challenging conditions, proved those original expectations to be correct.
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There are six newcomers in the field this season. Two of them had crashed out of the race after five corners, and four of them failed to see the chequered flag.
Only two were left standing at the end of the grand prix: Oliver Bearman, pootling around the back in a car perhaps too slow to do any damage, and Antonelli.
Antonelli started the race 16th and finished fourth, a five-second penalty for an unsafe release rescinded after the race.
It was a tremendous performance.
Of course many of those gains came via misfortune for others, but that’s also exactly the point. In a race most of the rookies — and far more experienced drivers like Fernando Alonso and Carlos Sainz — binned their cars, Antonelli did not.
In his first wet grand prix — in his first grand prix — he kept his nose clean and brought the car home directly behind teammate George Russell.
It’s a little glimpse into why Mercedes was so keen to promote the Italian, harking back to that legendary wet test in Silverstone in which he was several seconds faster than better tenured drives in identical machinery.
The 18-year-old will of course need more time to get himself anywhere near his potential, but from his very first race the signs are already very promising.
Heartbreak as Lawson crashes out late | 00:38
DOOHAN UNSCATHED FROM FIRST WEEKEND
What to make of Jack Doohan’s first weekend as a full-time Formula 1 driver?
Every round counts for the Queenslander, who’s widely speculated to be under pressure of an early exit by late April if he can’t give a good account of himself quickly.
A crash just corners into his maiden grand prix might not sound like much of a result, and truthfully it isn’t. But the smash isn’t enough to undermine what overall was a reasonable weekend for the Australian.
He demonstrated throughout practice and into qualifying that the raw speed he wielded in Formula 2 has translated to F1. He was consistently a match for Pierre Gasly, with only yellow flags preventing him from following the Frenchman into Q3.
His mistake in the wet was understandable, even if it was clumsy, spinning his wheels on the painted white lines and eliminating himself from the race.
But he was hardly the only rookie to make that mistake, and his was committed when the track was at its wettest.
On a track he’s barely familiar with and in conditions he’s never raced in, it adds up to a pass mark for the Australian.
“Lesson learnt,” he said. “I’m making sure I spend some time with the boys to understand how I can make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“We have a race weekend already next week in Shanghai. We’re going to regroup, keep our heads high.
“We’ve had a strong package this weekend — very strong yesterday afternoon — so we need to keep strong and bounce back next weekend.”
He’ll need to build from here of course, but Australia was no disaster despite the damage bill.
‘I’m faster’: McLaren’s tense exchange | 00:41
FERRARI HAS WORK TO DO
How bad was Ferrari’s weekend?
The famous Italian team was outscored by Sauber, the team widely tipped to be up against it in the battle to stay off the bottom of the championship favourite.
It was, to put it mildly, not great — especially considering the team was dream of pole position and victory on Friday night following an apparently deceptive day of practice.
Other than the brief moment Lewis Hamilton found himself in the lead during a late pit stop cycle, the race had few bright spots.
The team’s lack of pace was viscerally demonstrated by Oscar Piastri’s gutsy but ultimately straightforward around-the-outside pass on the seven-time champion at the super-fast turn 9-10 chicane, making the Ferrari look like a Formula 2 car.
“My job is to be concerned with everything,” team principal Frédéric Vasseur said on Sunday night. “Today was a bit more difficult, but it was not the whole picture of the season for sure.”
Vasseur argued that Albert Park is already an outlier on the calendar. Throw in the wacky weather and an admission that the team lost its way with set-up on Saturday, and the deficit is almost explainable.
“I think that the conditions today are not representative at all of the picture of the performance,” he argued. “If you want to have a look at what we did from Friday morning to Q2, I think it’s much more representative than the pace in the conditions today.
“I think that the real picture of the performance is more probably what we saw on Friday and Saturday.”
But then the crucial admission: “Even in this case McLaren is one step ahead.”
It is, to be fair to Vasseur, too early to draw any definitive conclusions about performance. But that doesn’t make today’s results insignificant.
“We are on the back foot,” Leclerc said bluntly. “We definitely are.
“If you look at the pace today of the McLaren, it was unbelievable.”
Worse is that next up is the Chinese Grand Prix at a circuit that Ferrari struggled at last year and that it expects grief from again this year.
The size of the task facing the team is unclear, but the task is clearly there.
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