Italian GP conclusions: Time for Norris to toughen up and Verstappen to resist temptation

Oliver Harden
Charles Leclerc smiles with his head lowered in golden light after winning at Monza, with a PlanetF1.com conclusions banner positioned centre-bottom

Charles Leclerc claimed his second Italian Grand Prix victory for Ferrari at Monza

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Leclerc pulled off a one-stop strategy to claim Ferrari‘s first victory at their home race in five years, with McLaren drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris finishing second and third respectively. Here are our conclusions from Italy…

Conclusions from the 2024 Italian Grand Prix

Charles Leclerc success a victory for the culture Fred Vasseur has created at Ferrari

Charles Leclerc was certain that his victory in Monaco would stand untouched as the highlight of his F1 2024 season.

Then he strode on to the podium at Monza, climbed on to the top step for the first time in five years and took in the sights and sounds.

You never forget your first time – not at this place, not in that car, not in those colours – but Leclerc later remarked that this victory was right up there with 2019, partly because it was so unexpected.

There was some amusement in the closing stages as word gradually spread around the circuit that this win was indeed on, the cheers of the crowd as Leclerc’s car passed becoming ever louder as a growing number came to realise what was about to happen, every lap one little step closer to the dream of a Ferrari triumph at Monza.

Ferrari introduced a major upgrade this weekend to continue their mid-2024 revival, yet having only managed fourth on the grid Leclerc was convinced pre-race that McLaren and Mercedes held a small yet significant advantage.

Victory for Ferrari here required them to do something different, which came in the form of an inch-perfect one-stop race for a team so often mocked over the years for their strategy decisions.

Where did that come from, then? Look no further than Fred Vasseur.

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Listen to Vasseur speak for any length of time and it soon becomes clear that the team principal has placed a large emphasis on putting the team at ease with taking risks.

There has long been a problem – stretching back decades and only previously alleviated by the Todt/Schumacher/Brawn regime of the late 1990s and early 2000s – of Ferrari staff being inherently risk averse in such areas as race strategy, car design and setup, petrified of the consequences if bold decisions turn out to be the wrong ones.

At its most destructive, that edginess stifles creativity and engenders an environment in which fear and blame run riot.

It is why – and this cycle of doom occurred as recently as the 2022 season under Vasseur’s predecessor Mattia Binotto – mistakes breed yet more mistakes when things start to go awry at Ferrari and the whole structure of the team can so easily fall apart at the seams.

If the aggressive and demanding Italian media don’t get the poor soul who gets the strategy wrong, the impatient and reactive high-level management at Ferrari will.

See, to take one example, the fate of Chris Dyer, Schumacher’s title-winning race engineer who disappeared into thin air not long after a strategy error cost Fernando Alonso the World Championship at Abu Dhabi 2010. It’s been this way for years.

A key element of the remit of any successful Ferrari team principal is to provide a calming, steady hand and empower the workforce to not only make bold decisions but stick by them and, crucially, make amends when they don’t work out.

Vasseur, prepared to accept mistakes as a result of aggression but not carelessness, has identified a preparedness to take risks as a great strength of the dominant Red Bull team of recent years – the definition of a well-drilled racing operation confident in its own abilities – and is sprinkling that spirit over Ferrari.

It is the single most important change he has affected at Maranello since being appointed almost two years ago and is a powerful weapon when so many other teams – including McLaren, pushed into a second stop here when one would have been achievable with better race management – stray on the cautious side of life.

This was so much more than a Ferrari win at Monza.

It was total validation of Vasseur’s leadership and a victory for the culture he has created.

Lando Norris must toughen up, McLaren must sharpen up

If Lando Norris had an ounce of the self-belief and conviction of some of his rivals, he would be lethal.

But he does not and time and again it has been to his cost.

Norris has heard a lot this year about how he lacks the ruthlessness of his closest competitors, some of whom stand among the greatest drivers in the history of the sport, and that to truly mark himself as a potential World Champion too he must be more like them.

So he decided to do something about it.

The middle of 2024 will come to be remembered as Lando’s brat summer, when Norris launched ‘Operation: No More Mr Nice Guy’ to prove that fine line between good and evil runs through his heart too.

In the space of three mid-summer weeks came his bombardment of Max Verstappen in Austria and the McLaren team orders affair in Hungary, both signs of Norris being seduced by the dark side before he suddenly came to his senses and remembered who he is.

Retracting his call for Verstappen to apologise for their collision in Spielberg, and finally easing his pace to wave Oscar Piastri through in Budapest, both swiftly followed.

If there was ever a moment for Norris to make a statement that he is no longer to be messed with, though, it surely came on the opening lap of the Italian Grand Prix as Piastri (sensing that inherent vulnerability in his team-mate?) made a move around the outside of the second chicane.

What would Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton or Fernando Alonso have done in that situation? That’s the question routinely asked whenever Norris’s weaknesses are exploited.

The answer at Monza on Sunday came easily: they would have happily banged wheels with Piastri and/or ran him out of road.

Over. My. Dead. Body.

Whatever it took, whatever the situation required, they would have done it to ensure that they did not fall behind their own team-mate at the start of a race they really couldn’t afford to lose.

And if the method of their defence breached some pre-race team agreement? So what?

They would have done it anyway and debated the rights and wrongs of it later. To hell with your papaya rules.

Cuddly little Lando was once again too generous, too accommodating, on that opening lap, almost losing control of his own car in his heart-stopping desperation to avoid contact with Piastri.

From that moment his afternoon was effectively done, Norris fading (as he tends to do in adversity) and condemned to chasing a lead he would never get back, on a day he had been all set to disappear into the distance.

And why was Piastri even permitted to attack Norris on the first lap anyway?

With Verstappen starting down in seventh, this had the clear potential to be a pivotal day in the World Championship, a chance for Norris to take a great bite out of Max’s points lead.

If there was a time for McLaren to throw their full support behind Norris for the rest of the season, it was on Saturday night as the first point raised, to the sound of hands being rubbed together, in the post-qualifying debrief.

Instead, both team and driver left the impression that they do not recognise the scale of the opportunity opening up before them, that they are simply not yet ready to seize the day – at least not this year.

Norris needs to toughen up, McLaren need to sharpen up.

Max Verstappen must refrain from making a bad situation worse at Red Bull

Martin Brundle has a saying: an F1 car driven in anger goes only one of two ways – sideways or backwards.

Max Verstappen fell into that trap at the Hungarian Grand Prix before the summer break, taking on the world – his race engineer and strategists, the slow-to-turn RB20, always a place for Lewis Hamilton in that mix too – and it didn’t end too well.

Having qualified third in Budapest, he finished a distant fifth and was considered fortunate to avoid a penalty for his collision with Hamilton in the closing laps.

On a day McLaren claimed only their second one-two finish since 2010, a performance of that nature – petulant, impetuous and self-defeating – was a sure-fire way to rapidly lose the considerable points lead he had built up early in the season.

Might that day prove the turning point to ultimately secure Verstappen a fourth consecutive World Championship over the coming months?

Max has always been a quick learner and it has been noticeable in the races since Hungary that he has been slightly more accepting – well, tolerant – of Red Bull’s current reality and just got on with it.

The more pointed criticisms of the car and the team? The incredulity that Red Bull are now so vulnerable after establishing such a commanding early season advantage?

That’s mostly been left to Jos, nicely fulfilling the enforcer role he was made for to get his son’s point across.

Max?

He’s taking no pleasure from this, of course, and his bashing of the steering wheel after another once-rare slow Red Bull pit stop at Monza offered a telling glimpse of his simmering frustration.

Yet on the track, at least, he is doing well to keep the emotion out of it, distilling everything down to the essentials, driving the car to the limit of its abilities (whatever that limit might be on any given day) and fighting with all his might to refrain from making a bad situation even worse.

This park-the-bus approach is very different from what he has been used to over the last couple of years, yet banking consistent points to minimise the McLaren threat is all he can really do right now.

Along with hoping like hell that Red Bull bring a fix soon.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli: A risk Mercedes didn’t need to take?

Here’s the fundamental point about Andrea Kimi Antonelli: would Mercedes have been so eager to promote him for F1 2025 if Lewis Hamilton wasn’t leaving for Ferrari?

Is his talent so irresistible, his performances in F2 this season so compelling, that he demands being presented with a race-winning grand prix car at the earliest opportunity?

The answer to both, on current evidence, is no.

Yet when the full history of Formula 1 is stitched together piece by piece, it would not have seemed quite right had the great Lewis Hamilton been succeeded at the great Mercedes-Benz by, say, Carlos Sainz, the driver ultimately deemed not good enough by Ferrari, or a middling name like Esteban Ocon or Valtteri Bottas.

Hence Toto Wolff feeling compelled to, as he told media including PlanetF1.com the morning after Hamilton’s move to Ferrari was announced back in February, “to do something bold.”

And if Max Verstappen is unattainable, at least for now, the next-best thing is to unleash F1’s latest boy wonder.

But at what cost?

Wolff may like to think of Antonelli as Mercedes’ answer to Max and the Second Coming of Ayrton Senna (many have indeed noticed the spooky physical likeness).

Yet Antonelli’s flat first appearance on an F1 race weekend on Friday at Monza, where he crashed at Parabolica after just 10 minutes of opening practice, was a reminder that this talent must be handled with care.

It isn’t just the pressure of replacing Hamilton facing Antonelli, but of representing a brand of Mercedes’ stature and all that comes with it; of racing a front-running car for a team whose expectations are rising again; of carrying the hopes of Italy, a nation with modest success in this sport across the last two decades.

Thrown in at the deep end?

More like being dropped into the middle of the ocean with weights strapped to your legs and a lost voice for good measure.

It would be foolish – dangerous – for Wolff, who stressed on Friday that Antonelli “needs to cope with the pressure if he wants to be champion one day”, to disregard the potentially crippling scrutiny awaiting someone so young.

Such a daring driver choice is out of character for Wolff, often portrayed as one of the more emotionally intelligent and thoughtful leaders in modern sport, after persisting with Bottas for longer than most anticipated and ensuring that George Russell completed a full three-year apprenticeship at Williams before being promoted.

Both he and Russell have remarked in the years since that George spent a little too long at Williams, yet in the case of Antonelli, Wolff has gone from one extreme to the other.

Even Red Bull, that great training ground for talented youngsters, were not this adventurous with a teenage Verstappen.

And only on Friday, Wolff spoke sensitively about how Mick Schumacher had the talent “crushed” out of him at Haas, a case study in what can happen when a young driver is mismanaged and exposed to a more difficult start to life in F1 than strictly necessary.

Wolff speaks convincingly about Antonelli and with some certainty that the “highlights” in F1 2025 will far outweigh any downsides of fielding a rookie. He is, to all intents and purposes, the face of the team’s future.

Yet essential to that future, as we know from Red Bull’s various driver experiments over the years, is navigating those tricky early days when mistakes have the capacity to snowball quickly and take the light from a young man’s eyes.

If Antonelli comes through that with his reputation unscathed, let alone enhanced, then we’ll know for certain that he’s something special.

‘Reverend’ James Vowles’ decisions at Williams are increasingly erratic

“I know just how hard the whole factory worked to get that update on the car – and I watched it burn.”

This, Logan Sargeant, is your epitaph.

James Vowles was adamant at Monza that Williams’ decision to seek a replacement was not made until the day after the Dutch Grand Prix, yet his facial expression on the pit wall in the moments after Sargeant’s crash in final practice last weekend told a different story.

Much clearer, instead, was Vowles’ explanation for making a mid-season change.

Having introduced their “first proper upgrade” of F1 2024, as Alex Albon put it, Williams – now seven points behind Alpine and 22 adrift of seventh-placed Haas – have a golden opportunity to salvage something from this season and can no longer afford to carry a passenger in the second car.

Raw performance, Vowles says, is the priority from here.

Yet the decision to install Franco Colapinto, a rookie with just a single FP1 session to his name prior to the Italian Grand Prix, for the remaining nine races flew in the face of that logic when Liam Lawson was there for the taking.

PlanetF1.com revealed last week that negotiations over a loan deal for Lawson broke down when Red Bull insisted on a recall option given the team’s fluid driver situation, with Sergio Perez and Daniel Ricciardo not guaranteed to see out the season in their current seats.

Williams’ reluctance to sign Lawson, only then to be potentially faced with finding another team-mate for Albon between now and Abu Dhabi, was widely seen as understandable.

Yet if Red Bull were ever going to drop Perez during the season, it was surely after the Belgian Grand Prix when the team seemed ready to put him out of his misery.

And if they were ever going to replace Ricciardo, it was when his season hit rock bottom back in Japan in April.

Having backed both drivers so publicly in the aftermath of Spa, the tentatively improving form and results of Perez and Ricciardo has made the prospect of a mid-season change at Red Bull more remote now than at any stage all season.

And the evidence of Lawson’s five-race cameo in mid-2023 suggests he would have been the ideal plug-in-and-play option to provide the instant performance Williams require.

Colapinto acquitted himself well at Monza – his 12th place finish on debut was a better result than Sargeant had managed all year in the second car – yet his mistake in Q1 was a rookie error by a rookie driver at a time Williams are in need of something more substantial.

And having fallen short of ‘doing a Nyck de Vries’ here in a car traditionally suited to high-speed stretches of Monza, could this be as good as it gets for Colapinto in F1 2024, even as his confidence grows and his data banks expand?

The next two races in Baku and Singapore are the most challenging circuits on the calendar, regardless of a driver’s level of experience, and each of the remaining far-flung flyaway races all contain their own little quirks, from the bumps of Austin and the high altitude of Mexico to the kerbs of Qatar.

Put another way, why go to the trouble of dropping Sargeant at all if his replacement is also highly unlikely to contribute decisively to the team’s tally? A mid-season change only makes sense if it brings a material benefit.

Vowles was insistent that the decision to promote Colapinto was not motivated by finance, with the Argentine sponsors falling over themselves to join the team more effect than cause.

Yet if banking semi-consistent Constructors’ Championship points with both cars really was the aim of the game here, it is the latest in a growing line of confusing calls by the Vowles.

A bit like withdrawing Sargeant after Albon crashed in Australia, destroying his confidence in a single act having spent the previous 12 months building it up, and then letting 12 more races go to waste by keeping him in that seat.

Or by making public his interest in beating Aston Martin and Ferrari to the signing of Adrian Newey.

Or by providing weekly updates on his pursuit of Carlos Sainz, whose decision to join Williams for 2025, most agree, was primarily motivated by reservations over the Audi F1 project rather than anything his new employers had to offer.

Guenther Steiner, the former Haas team principal, argued that such sharp operators as Toto Wolff and Fred Vasseur wouldn’t have dared being so open about signing Newey and Sainz due to the risk of being left utterly humiliated if they decided to go elsewhere.

And while his transparency is refreshing, earlier this week David Coulthard quipped that the Williams boss is in danger of becoming “the Reverend Vowles” following his latest “sermon” on the mount following Albon’s qualifying DSQ at Zandvoort.

There were times last year when it seemed Vowles could do no wrong at Williams, yet as his difficult second season has unfolded so the gloss has gradually come off.

It’s never a good sign when a team principal leaves himself open to satire.

Will F1 and the FIA follow through with Kevin Magnussen ban?

There is a very good reason why no driver has been hit with a race ban since F1’s current penalty points system was introduced a decade ago.

It is more a measure of competence than discipline. They’re all too good, too savvy, too streetwise to cross the line and get caught out.

It reflects so poorly on Kevin Magnussen, then, that he has become the first to reach the 12-point threshold.

Yet will Formula 1 and the FIA really follow through with a ban?

Especially in this era when the drivers and their personalities, all stars of Netflix, are central to F1’s appeal in some parts of the world, including one-driver nations like Magnussen’s homeland of Denmark?

Recall how in 2017, with F1 under the new ownership of Liberty Media, Sebastian Vettel evaded disqualification – much to the horror of many seasoned observers – when the opportunity was there to throw the book at him for his collision with Lewis Hamilton behind the Safety Car.

Bans may be commonplace in other sports, yet the reluctance to come down hard on Vettel revealed at a deep (and understandable) reluctance to pull drivers out of grands prix.

Instinct says there is a deal to be done – maybe a substantial fine to be paid, maybe some community service work for the FIA – before Baku to save Magnussen from one final indignity before his F1 career is over for good.

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