While Lando Norris’s hopes of victory in Formula 1’s Spanish Grand Prix were effectively derailed by his start, there was equally a phase late on that proved just as critical.

With the McLaren driver having earned himself a tyre offset against Max Verstappen, the advantage of fresher rubber in the final stint offered him a chance to overhaul the Red Bull for the lead.

Norris duly put on a charge and managed to get himself just 2.2 seconds behind at the chequered flag, but there was a sense of regret afterwards about how he handled that final 19-lap stint on Pirelli’s soft rubber.

PLUS: The ruthless marker Norris laid down with his Verstappen squeeze at Barcelona

He was left pondering whether or not he should have stuck to his guns with a tyre trick that he and McLaren have got on top of this year.

This surrounds bringing in fresh rubber slowly after a stop, because it performs much better over the long haul, than if drivers gun it straight out of the pits.

Speaking after the race, Norris said: “It wasn’t the longest final stint, so I didn’t know if we were going to get to that time in the stint when I really start to catch.

“I think really, like the last three laps, the gaps were pretty big in terms of how much it was coming down. Yeah, it’s a hard one.

“I don’t know if maybe I pushed a bit too much in the beginning and struggled a little bit more at the end. It’s very difficult to judge these things.”

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W15, Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

What Norris is referring to is that, when he came out of the pits for the final dash to the flag, aware of the need to chase down a 7.696s gap to Verstappen, he elected to go on the attack.

His first flying lap was a 1m17.377s, and then two laps later he put in the fastest lap of the race – a 1m17.115s – as he began his hunt.

But, while pushing to the maximum like this may seem the obvious way to haul in the leader, F1 teams and drivers spend time and effort mastering the different approach that is often better.

PLUS: Why it wasn’t just Russell’s start that cost Norris the Spanish GP victory

It is one that involves actually taking it easier straight out of the pits.

Instead, drivers work to slowly bring their rubber in over a couple of laps – which ultimately leaves them with better stabilised pressures and temperatures that deliver better performance for the remainder of the stint.

As Pirelli’s chief engineer Simone Berra explains, it is all about getting tyres into a window where they perform at their peak.

“It’s all related to carcass temperature, and then obviously the pressure,” he said. “There is a sort of inertia for the tyres.

“If you have a gentle introduction, carcass temperature and pressure increase progressively. So, as you start to wear the tread of the tyres, you stabilise at a lower pressure than pushing as soon as possible and having a big peak of temperature and pressure.

“We know that being lower with pressure is much better than having higher pressures, because you have a bigger contact patch for one. Plus, with the carcass temperature and pressure, even the cornering stiffness of the tyre can be better.

“When you turn in and you have the mid-corner phase, obviously with higher temperatures, you generate more problems with the handling. So, you generate more understeer for example if you saturate the front axle.”

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, in the pitlane

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

According to Berra, the gains if drivers and teams can perfectly nail getting their tyre in the right window with this early stint treatment should not be underestimated.

“It’s really team dependent but it [the difference] could be around half or one Psi,” he said. “So, it can be significant.

“If you are managing the tyres, you can keep the pressures and temperatures under control, and you can stabilise them where you would like.

“So, it’s always a good compromise to have a gentle introduction. You have seen multiple times this year where a gentle introduction was beneficial compared to someone who pushed from the beginning of the stint.”

One classic example of this was Imola this year, where Norris took it easy early on in the final stint before his tyres hit their peak in another chase of Verstappen.

The British driver will never know for sure if the race would have turned out differently if he had taken it easier in the early laps of that final Spanish GP stint. But, with F1 as competitive as it is now, it is clear that picking the right approach – gunning it early with tyres or bringing them in gently – has emerged as a clear defining factor in the fight for victory.

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Lando Norris may have been kicking himself for losing out in Formula 1’s Spanish Grand Prix, but the team reckons there was nothing more he could have done.

Norris was left frustrated with himself that, despite securing pole position and having what appeared to be the fastest car at Barcelona, he was beaten to the chequered flag by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.

The Briton felt that with a better first corner, which saw him lose out to Max Verstappen and get trapped behind Mercedes’ George Russell early on where he lost critical time, the outcome of the race would have been totally different.

But McLaren thinks that what happened at Turn 1 was not Norris’s fault, and indeed it thinks the race was perfectly salvageable even at that point.

Instead, team principal Andrea Stella says that the superb getaway that Russell made to swoop from fourth to first at the first corner, was something that Norris had no control over.

“I think actually Lando’s start wasn’t very bad at all,” explained Stella. “It was a decent start, like he was almost one car ahead of Max.

“But the fact is that Russell got the double slipstream of Lando and Max. And, in corner one, I think Lando was just very wise, because it’s one second and your race is gone. And that’s not the way we want to race. We want to stay in the race.

“So I think from an opportunity point of view it [the start] was more of a detail. Okay, you can do an even better start, you would have been one metre ahead, but it’s very, very marginal.”

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W15, Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Details matter

McLaren and Norris have both talked in recent weeks about how details are now increasingly important in the fight with Red Bull, because small decisions can have huge implications when it comes to the fight for position.

Stella said that the Spanish GP proved his point, where factors like the long run down to Turn 1, and the opportunity that opened up for Russell because of the high-drag characteristics of current cars, had massive significance.

And although Norris was not helped by a slow 3.6-seconds final stop, compared to Verstappen’s 2.8s, Stella thinks it was not critical to the outcome.

“You have no margin in which you can compensate any little imprecision,” said Stella. “I would say that the main factor was that we couldn’t defend the first position in Barcelona.

“This is not necessarily a surprise, because you have such a long run to corner one. Plus the cars run high downforce, that as soon as you gain a bit of slipstream, it makes you so much faster than the car ahead. This meant that Lando  was not in condition to defend his pole position.

“I actually appreciated his wise approach to stay out of trouble there, because the race we know was going to come to us. It was just the couple of positions lost at corner one and the time lost behind Russell, they were the two decisive factors.

“And the [slow final] pit stop, probably another one second. But in fairness, even with the one second, if we had been behind Verstappen at the start [and in front of Russell], I think we could have played our cards with good chances.”

Stella said that strategy wise, he felt his team played things perfectly, in sticking to its guns for a tyre offset against its rivals that it believed would pay out handsomely at the end.

“We were very surprised when we saw people go in on lap 16-17 because for me, that’s a bit of self-inflicted pain at this circuit, no? The degradation is so high, overtaking is easy, so we thought this was going to bring us back in the race.

“If we hadn’t lost a little bit too long behind Russell at the start, the race would have come to us at the end of the 66 laps. So actually, I would like to praise the good work of our strategists, because somehow this is what we had in mind.”

Lando Norris stood there looking up at McLaren’s iconic motorhome as smoke billowed out of the back of it and an acrid smell filled the air.

He was dressed in a white t-shirt and black trousers and just his socks — in the haste to evacuate the building, he’d left his shoes and possessions in his drivers’ room on the bottom floor of the building.

Just minutes before, he’d been chilling in his private quarters while we were enjoying a cup of coffee and a spot of brunch when the lights went out and we were all told to get out of the building.

In panicked scenes in the Barcelona paddock, fire engines and ambulances arrived within minutes as marshals tackled the blaze, as well as Pirelli Motorsport chief Mario Isola, a part-time paramedic in his native Italy, who stormed into the motorhome with an extinguisher from the neighbouring Pirelli hospitality.

The motorhome was cordoned off and remained off limits to McLaren’s staff, while neighbouring teams threw open their doors in a rare display of camaraderie within the paddock.

Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri were forced to take sanctuary in the team’s engineering buildings as their pre-qualifying preparation was thrown into chaos.

Which makes his pole — his second of his Formula 1 career — even more impressive as he pipped Max Verstappen by 0.02s.

Fire and rescue on the scene of the McLaren hospitality fire

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

He said: «First of all, the best thing is everyone’s safe, everyone’s doing well. One person was taken to hospital just for some check-ups, but all good otherwise. So a bit of a scare for the whole team, never a nice thing.

«A bit more of a stressful day than I would have liked. I lost my shoes. That was probably as bad as it got for me!

«I’ve not been in my normal room. I’ve not been able to relax and chill out as much as what I normally do.

«I’ve had a lot of offers from people, so it’s been great. But a lot of the teams have been very, very nice to us.»

When asked by Autosport if he had been required to borrow equipment from rival teams and for extra details on the disruption, he added: «It’s all been a little bit messy.

«I have one or two sets of everything and I think they managed to get some stuff out but some of it’s probably not the best to use or it smells pretty bad from the fire.

«Some things I got out, but I like to listen to my music — Oscar complains a lot because my music’s so loud.

«But I just didn’t have that this time and I’m up in the engineering office and Oscar’s down in the truck below. And that’s Zak’s office that I’ve taken over, so now Zak’s a bit unhappy.

«Honestly, nothing’s been an issue. And I’ve never been that guy to kind of complain about these things.

«Maybe tomorrow will impact me a bit more that I can’t get that quiet time that that I love. But it’s not the end of the world, so I’m not going to complain about it.»

On Saturday night, McLaren released a statement saying that its team member who had been taken to hospital had been discharged, adding its «thanks go to the circuit and hospital medical staff for their care and support».

McLaren now faces an anxious wait to discover the true extent of the damage caused by the fire, which is believe to have started above the team’s kitchen area at the rear of the building.

Fire alarm at the McLaren Hospitality

Photo by: Jon Noble

The building, known as the «Team Hub» has recently been refurbished and downsized to reduce transportation costs and hit sustainability targets.

However, Norris said he was unsure of how much of the Team Hub would be salvaged.

He added: «It is a shame that it won’t be used today or tomorrow, I don’t think, for anything, maybe not into the future, but that’s not anything that I know about for now.»

It comes at a crunch time as F1 teams embark on their first of three races in consecutive weekends, which already places staff under strain.

The triple header in Barcelona, Spielberg and Silverstone is a 3,000 mile round trip on the road where the erection and dismantling of the motorhome is a crucial part of the logistics.

A full deep dive into what caused the fire will be conducted by McLaren while Isola explained the scene he faced as he rushed to help.

He said: «We started to smell this air which was like burning plastic. And when I went down with a fire extinguisher, some guys from McLaren said they had just used theirs.

«We have them here and I took one. I went inside to try to help and inside I saw some smoke coming from the kitchen and then after a few minutes, the firefighters arrived.

«We just left to let them work but the smoke was quite intense, and the number of fires was quite a quite a lot.

«Luckily, nobody was injured, and just a couple of people that I understood, they were breathing some some smoke, but it should be okay, so everything is fine.»