Oscar Piastri keeps cool in Qatar after Mercedes rivalry overheats

Not wishing to diminish Max Verstappen’s weekend in Qatar, but Oscar Piastri was the star.

Sure, the Dutchman’s second place in Saturday’s sprint race sealed the drivers’ championship with six grands prix still to run, and in Sunday’s main event he won from pole position. Yet it was Piastri who was the real talking point, winning the Saturday sprint from P1, and then charging from sixth on the grid to second place in the GP.

The 22-year-old, from Melbourne, is one cool customer and a Formula One race winner just 17 weekends into his F1 career. It probably ranks as the most stellar debut season since Lewis Hamilton’s arrival in 2007.

McLaren team-mate Lando Norris, who shared the podium with Piastri on both occasions in Qatar, leads him on points, but the two are incredibly close on pace. Without even taking their combined age of 45 into consideration, they are the best driver pairing in the sport right now.

McLaren started the season with a misbehaving car and have tamed it, extracting an incredible amount of pace. Six races in, Aston Martin were second in the constructors’ standings with 120 points, McLaren sixth with only 17.

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Today, McLaren are on 219 and Aston, who have slipped to fourth, are only 11 points up the road. That’s what successful season-long car development and a well-matched driving duo will do for your results.

Zak Brown, the papaya team’s CEO, has talent-spotting skills. Between his early support of Lando, which was formalised in February 2017, to his poaching of Piastri from Alpine’s junior programme and his guidance of Andrea Stella, who joined from Ferrari in 2015 but was only promoted to team principal this year, Brown is beginning to bring home the bacon.

Not all driver pairings were looking as sharp under the desert floodlights. Lewis Hamilton reviewed the footage at the start, which saw him collide with Mercedes team-mate George Russell, and accepted full responsibility.

The incident hinted at Hamilton’s desperation to get one over Verstappen and win his first race in nearly two years. Russell, furious at the time but who said there were ‘no hard feelings’ later, soldiered on to fourth.

If Lewis had given them a bit more room at the start, they probably would have both been on the podium.

The driver pairing most out of whack is Verstappen and the perennially error-prone Sergio Perez. Just like in Austria, ‘Checo’ could not keep his Red Bull within track limits. Deleted qualifying times and in-race penalties meant the Mexican started from the pitlane and finished tenth. He also crashed out of the sprint.

Red Bull boss Christian Horner, who had supported Perez in public until this point, fired a broadside which hints at the likely cancellation of the six-time GP winner’s contract: that Red Bull no longer have a driver pairing that matches their rivals.

‘You can see Mercedes have a pair, McLaren have a pair, Ferrari have a pair that are quite tight,’ said Horner. ‘We desperately want [Checo] to find that form. We need him to.’

Being Verstappen’s team-mate when he has been so crushingly dominant seems to have destroyed Perez’s confidence. He’s been overdriving in a bid to keep up. A reset can’t come soon enough. Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson are keeping a watching brief to see if the chess pieces move. What should Red Bull do? If I were Horner, I would split up the McLaren pairing.

Qatar throws up a torturous test

The 36C-plus temperatures, the physicality of the track and the demands of a three-stop tyre strategy left the drivers in a real state.

Super-fit athletes they may be but the 57 laps took it out of them like no race we have seen before. Williams’ Logan Sargeant was forced to retire because he could not continue, while team-mate Alex Albon visited the medical centre afterwards.

At least two drivers – Sargeant and Esteban Ocon – vomited in their helmets. Lance Stroll said he ‘was passing out in the car’. Valtteri Bottas, who is no stranger to a sauna, described it as ‘torture’.

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