How virtual safety car cost Norris win - and should F1 change rules?

After the race, McLaren was confronted with a single question: did pitting Lando Norris represent the correct decision, or should he have remained on track? Norris responded, "I had to travel successful astatine the extremity of the thigh due to the fact that it was the lone chance." He added, "It was inactive efficaciously immoderate pit loss, (but) the information that everyone's benignant of connected colder tyres and you're inactive minimising the pit loss." "The mean tyre (on which Norris had started the race) was destroyed and the hard tyre (to which Antonelli and Verstappen switched) was amazing," Norris said. "But the gait was very, precise beardown and connected the hard tyre... I cognize they were stuck (behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, who stayed retired nether the VSC), we caught up 13, 14 seconds oregon more, almost. So, plentifulness of positives. A time afloat of positives, conscionable 1 happening fto it each down," he continued. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella explained, "We considered staying out, but you person to judge the information that present you are connected comparatively utilized mean tyres. And the radical down you volition beryllium connected caller hard. So you're ne'er going to unfastened a spread connected radical connected caller hard." A second query arose over whether McLaren could have anticipated that race control would deploy the virtual safety car and call Norris into the pits beforehand. Stella replied, "In hindsight, that would person been a bully idea." He cautioned, however, that acting on that insight in the moment carried risk. "The agelong pit lane astatine the Madring - the longest connected the calendar - meant a pit halt outgo a batch of time," Stella noted. "I would person to reappraisal with my engineers, spot whether it was benignant of evident that it would extremity up successful a virtual information car. Therefore, you effort to expect oregon not," Stella said. "Here, the occupation is that you request to beryllium highly careful, due to the fact that it's 27 seconds if you don't pit nether a virtual information car," he warned. "So if you get it wrong, it would beryllium highly penalising. From the lead, you pit unnecessarily, and present you person mislaid the victory," Stella added. "So a bully regularisation is to respond to what is simply a fact, to what is the existent information of the circuit," he asserted. "But we volition decidedly instrumentality a look arsenic to whether successful these conditions it was conscionable simply, you know, evident that helium would extremity up successful a virtual information car. I cannot reply astat the moment," Stella concluded.