McLaren boss, Andrea Stella denies that his team would have been best served by having Lando Norris move aside for teammate Oscar Piastri.
Having lost out to Max Verstappen's bravura performance in qualifying, McLaren's best chance of claiming the race victory was to jump the Dutchman at the start of the race... it failed.
Consequently the Woking pair were forced to spend the afternoon running in the Red Bull's dirty air.
As Norris held back in a bid to preserve his tyres, teammate Piastri believed he had better pace to attack the race leader, but the team opted to maintain the status quo.
"I needed the straight to be about another 100 metres longer, and then maybe I could have had a small chance," said Piastri of his failure to overhaul his teammate under his own steam. "I got close a couple of times, but never close enough to do anything realistically.
"I felt like I had strong pace," he continued, "but just not quite enough to be able to do anything. With the dirty air, once you get so close, it's very difficult to stay so close. Consequently, the chance of anything happening realistically was pretty slim."
The Australian called on the team but his advice was ignored.
"On the pit stop timing, Russell had pitted, I think the lap before, and Leclerc wasn't that far behind," said Piastri. "We didn't really know what the undercut power was going to be like. We'd kind of gone a fair way into the race on the mediums anyway, so from my side, there wasn't anything that that obviously wrong with what we did.
"And then at the end, I said what I felt. Clearly, the team were happy with the way things were, and, I mean, if I was in Lando's position, I would also be pretty happy with the way things were. That's fine, I just said what I felt in the car and that's how we want to go."
"I could see Max quite clearly for the whole race, but just couldn't make any inroads," said Norris. "I think him in clean air was enough to stay in that position and he didn't make any mistakes. He drove a good race.
"The race was won yesterday in hindsight," he admitted, "and I guess we always kind of know the better position you start, the more chance you have of winning.
"I think our pace was probably slightly better, but not enough to get through the dirty air, and kind of get into the DRS. And then passing is a whole other story, because it's pretty much impossible to pass here.
"We tried some things," he added. "Maybe we could have tried a bit more with strategy and overcut or undercut. We just boxed on the same lap for some reason. So some things we'll discuss, but good points for us as a team.
"Decent points for me, of course, would have liked a little bit more, but have to take seconds sometimes."
"I don't think it is so clear that Oscar was faster," insisted Stella. "I think Lando was trying to get in Max's slipstream even closer, but any time you went below one second there was a significant loss of grip.
"So then Lando was doing a little bit of an elastic today, trying to cool down a bit his tyres, going again. So I don't think it is a situation that we should judge at face value in terms of what the pace of the car was.
"Lando was trying to get close to Verstappen with maximum momentum, but it was difficult."
The track resurfacing has led to less abrasion and thereby less tyre wear, something which had previously provided overtaking opportunities.
"It was something we knew right from the start that on this track you need seven, eight tenths of performance advantage in order to be able to overtake," said the Italian. "This sort of lap time difference may be generated because there is degradation in the tyres, but with the new tarmac, Suzuka has changed the feature of being a high degradation circuit. It is now a very low degradation circuit. It was a very easy one-stop and there are not many strategic options."
Again, Stella believes the race was lost on Saturday.
"I'm sure our two drivers will have commented themselves that their qualifying laps were not the best laps in qualifying in their careers," he said. "Clearly when Max elevates the game so much, you need to nail laps in qualifying and you need to bring home any possible millisecond.
"Yesterday it was indeed a matter of milliseconds with 43, 45 between P3 and P1. "So ultimately I think the qualifying laps yesterday in Q3 were even more a determining factor than anything that happened today in the race."
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