Six laps in clean air – the overcut that turned McLaren around

Pirelli's pre-race calculation was unusually open: one stop and two stops were essentially equal. One stop meant medium → hard around laps 26–32; two stops gave more pace but a greater risk of getting stuck in traffic, decisive at the Hungaroring where overtaking is hard, per F1.com. Our overtaking threshold for the circuit is 1.04 s/lap – among the highest on the calendar – and the pit loss 22.7 s. Pirelli's nomination was C3 as hard, C4 as medium and C5 as soft. It ended with two stops for twelve drivers, three for five and one for two, per Pirelli.

The data shows why the one-stop rarely held: the hard was the worst tyre of the race. Degradation was 0.069 s/lap on the hard (C3), 0.048 on the medium (C4) and only 0.043 on the soft (C5). That inverts the usual picture – and it is the key to both Norris's and Verstappen's races.

Piastri took the lead from Norris on the opening lap. Norris then sat a second behind, complaining that he was quicker but could not use the pace in dirty air, per F1.com. McLaren ran both on medium → hard → hard: Piastri stopped on lap 16, Norris on lap 17, and the order was unchanged. Lap 30: Piastri, Norris +1.0.

Piastri made his second stop on lap 33 for new hards. Norris stayed out. The gap was 21.3 seconds against a pit loss of 22.7 – Norris needed to gain a second and a half over the laps he had left. He gained five.

But not because old tyres beat new ones. Piastri's first two laps on the new set were quicker than Norris: 83.9 and 84.1 against 84.6–84.7. Then came the traffic. On laps 37–38 Piastri ran 85.5 and 86.4, with an incident with Sainz as he tried to get through the lapped cars – three seconds in two laps, while Norris rolled 84.5s in clean air. When Norris stopped on lap 39 he came out 3.8 seconds ahead. Before the stops: Piastri, Norris. After: Norris, Piastri. McLaren described it the same way, per F1.com: Piastri's stop gave Norris a clear track, Norris produced a run of fast laps while Piastri got stuck, and Norris jumped him through the pit sequence.

It is an overcut in its purest form, and it teaches something about how to read strategy: the tyre offset was there, but the traffic cost more than the offset gave. New tyres plus traffic lost to old tyres plus clean air.

The simulator backs the call. Click a scenario to load it in Simulate below.

Why did McLaren bring Piastri in so early? Lap 33 was not a strange stop in itself – the two-stop was competitive and Pirelli's window for the second stop sat around laps 40–46 with room to move it. With two cars close together the team also needed to separate their windows. What was underestimated was the value of clean air for Norris and the cost of traffic for Piastri. Would Piastri have gained by extending? Probably – but the simulator cannot put a number on it, because it builds his pace from stints run in traffic and cannot know how quick he would have been in clean air ahead of Norris. We leave that question open.

On lap 55 Piastri hit gearbox trouble and retired. We never saw the final fight, and Piastri was already strategically behind – but strategy alone did not decide their result. The Virtual Safety Car his car triggered gave Norris a discounted stop for softs without losing the lead: medium → hard → hard → soft, a three-stop out of what was meant to be two. The simulator says the stop was worth eight seconds; the win was already secured. 15.1 seconds ahead of Verstappen at the flag.

Red Bull ran medium → hard and then took softs on lap 41 for the final 29 laps. It worked because the 2026 C5 is a race tyre, not a qualifying tyre – Pirelli noted that several drivers managed very long soft stints, per Pirelli, and our data gives the soft the lowest degradation of the three. Verstappen's stint lost 0.02 s/lap. The simulator says hards instead would have cost him 20 seconds and three places. Laurent Mekies singled out the strategy calls afterwards as part of the second place, per F1.com.

If a single moment is to be picked out, it is Piastri in on lap 33, Norris out until lap 39. Six laps turned McLaren's internal order. But the bigger lesson from Hungary is that tyre age is not enough as a basis for analysis: track position and clean air can be worth more than a big tyre offset, and the tyre that looked slowest on paper – the soft – was the one that degraded least. Put Hungary, Zandvoort and Monza side by side and the 2026 pattern emerges: the soft has become a race tyre, the hard is no longer automatically the most durable, and VSC windows and clean air outweigh the pre-race plan.

How we did it: lap data from FastF1 (F1 Live Timing). Degradation = within-stint slope on green laps, fuel-corrected at 0.035 s/lap. The simulator runs everyone else on their actual lap times and models the changed driver on his own pace per compound from the race. Sources: F1.com (Pirelli's pre-race assessment, McLaren's and Mekies' comments), press.pirelli.com (Pirelli's post-race note), FIA (Piastri's retirement).