There is much debate over the decision making at McLaren Racing in Qatar yesterday. There is much media pressure on the team and the drivers to try to blame "Papaya Rules" , pressure which is matched only by that put on the drivers to try to cause divisions. The endless demands on everyone involved to try to get an answer to support a theory that there is a conspiracy to favour Lando Norris over Oscar Piastri , or the other way around, demeans F1 as a sport and increases the impression that it is not only entertainment but that it's staged entertainment.

And, to be clear - sometimes it is. Shameful team orders have brought the sport into disrepute but when team orders were banned, teams passed coded messages which, even though the ban has been abandoned, still shape pit to car communication: "X is faster than you" has passed into the lexicon of F1 even though it's not needed now. In fact, the team that uses it least is.... McLaren. If McLaren give team orders, they do so in plain English over an open communications channel - a channel which is used by the drivers to debate the point, even though team orders are exactly that: orders which drivers are contracted to obey. In the heat of a race, drivers have only one view: how to finish ahead of everyone else including my team mate.

McLaren have been controversial over team orders in the past : telling the much faster Norris to give up his first win so that Ricciardo could struggle over the line first for his only win with the team rarely rates a mention but it was a pivotal moment in how the team treats its drivers: unless there is a specific team imperative, or the team is aware of a technical reason that it wants to keep quiet, its drivers are free to race. That's backed with several protocols. some that are race specific, including one that the driver in the lead gets first option on when to go into the pits to change tyres.

In Qatar 2025, the circumstances surrounding the race were dramatic. McLaren had been dominant, first with Piastri and then with Norris with Red Bull Racing & Red Bull Technology 's Verstappen giving the lie to the message "Objects in the Rear view mirror are closer than they seem". Then came a rider: "until they aren't" as the current World Drivers' Champion suddenly started scoring points by the fistful.

Then came McLaren's problem with a micrometer: as I've written elsewhere, the problems with McLaren's plank wear in Las Vegas were obvious from before the first corner: both cars were creating trails of sparks far more than any others. The same conspiracy theorists and armchair critics claimed that McLaren had tried to gain an advantage by setting their car too low. To be honest, I, too, thought the car was too low but not as a result of any malicious intent - I drew attention to the fact that the team had to make decisions based on data and the data they had was, for various reasons, incomplete. It turned out that I was wrong: the car was not set too low, McLaren had been conservative and had set the car high enough to clear the bumps precisely because of the lack of data. But there was other data that was not taken into account: the effect of air rushing into the underneath of the cars, getting trapped, lifting the car and escaping, making the car crash down onto the road. When this was a major feature of the current ( and soon to end) specification, drivers were injured by the force of the bouncing which was given the name "porpoising". It's not only McLaren: Red Bull's number one has been having the same problem as his speed has picked up in recent races. Both McLarens were disqualified for excessive plank wear.

So, arriving in Qatar, Norris and Piastri had seen their sack of points from Las Vegas given to others, including Verstappen.

In Qatar, Piastri was in another league for both sets of qualifying and for the sprint race. And when the Grand Prix started, off he went. Barring something going horribly wrong, he would win and Norris would collect second or third - not enough to win the Championship that day but making it more likely than not that he'd win in the last race of the season - next week in Abu Dhabi.

Something went horribly wrong. This is how lessons in one discipline carry over to others. McLaren's decision making in both Las Vegas and Qatar were open to question - but only when we look at consequences - when we look at the decisions in the light of when they were made, they were not deeply flawed.

Data supports decision-making; it does not make decisions.

If absolutely all possible data is available, if more algorithms than you can shake a stick collect and process that data, all that happens is that probability, with a slug of game theory thrown in, studies are done, at mindboggling speed, and results produced for humans to consider.

If there are holes in the data, or if the algorithms have not been told to look for all possible data, or if someone tried to decide what, of that all possible data, was relevant, the algorithms cannot produce accurate results so the humans have to make assumptions.

We know the brain does that: there are old experiments that show how humans subconsciously fill in the gaps in data.

This, ultimately, feeds into the "unknown unknowns" argument - if you don't know there should be data, your brain can't fill in the gaps.

That's often the case in financial crime risk assessments but it wasn't the case with McLaren. The team knew what it didn't know but it also knew that filling in the gaps meant judgements that might go wrong.

Probability, game theory and risk. They are all in the same tumble dryer.

Looking specifically at the decision in Qatar not to bring in their drivers, then running in first and third places, there were enormous gaps in the data. Listening to commentary and reading lots of criticism, I have the strange feeling that I was the only one outside the team that thought it was a good idea at the time.

For reasons of safety, the total life of a set of tyres was set at 25 laps. If tyres had been used in practice, qualifying or (unlikely but possible) the sprint race, those laps counted. And 25 laps is almost exactly the wrong length for strategists to make a difference. In the game of chess that F1 has become, the strategists are as important as the drivers and the engineers who build the cars.

The race was scheduled for 57 laps so, at its simplest, that meant two changes. It also meant that if two sets were used for the maximum 25 laps per set, there would be seven laps at the end on new tyres. Often valuable points have been gained by being the last one onto soft tyres with just a few laps to go. Also, in the past couple of years, surprising results have been gained by those who "went long" on their first set of tyres.

A crash led to the safety car being deployed in lap seven, leaving teams with a complex set of calculations, some of which they did not have data for.

No one knew how long the hard tyres would last: would their performance drop off before they had done 25 laps? (My view: they would easily last 25 laps despite the special problems thrown up by the track) and there wasn't much more data about the medium tyres, because of the specific regulations about what tyres must be used at various points in a Sprint weekend. But for sure, it would be a lot more than seven laps.

I agreed with McLaren's decision to leave both drivers out, moving Norris up to P2, knowing that those who took a pit stop under the safety car gained about ten seconds because the speed of cars remaining on track is significantly lower than usual. Throwing away a set of tyres in less than a quarter of their expected life seems risky: others had to make their tyres last 25 laps, a prospect that was not certain due to the risk of punctures, crashes or other tribulations and, of course, there could have been another safety car where McLaren's cheap pit stop would benefit them. In F1 there's a saying "safety cars beget safety cars". And until after the whole field had passed the pits, no one knew how many cars would stop.

Who remembers the situation when Hamilton stayed out on slicks when the rest of the field, en masse, went into the pits to change to wet tyres, leaving Hamilton sitting on the grid all on his own? Similar circumstances: the actions of the other drivers were not predictable when Hamilton drove past the pit lane entrance and found himself isolated. Nor were they when Piastri and Norris did not stop. If only half of the others stopped, McLaren would have had an easier time of it later.

But there is another significant factor no one I've seen has mentioned. Many talk about "double stacking" which is when the team brings in both cars nose to tail and, sometimes, the second car has to wait for the first to leave. The conspiracy nuts say that McLaren chose not to do that because it would have disadvantaged Norris. I don't think so: he was far enough behind for Piastri to have gone by the time Norris arrived at the box and if he hadn't the efficiency of the McLaren pit crew would have meant only a fraction of a second would have been lost. Both Zak Brown and Andrea Stella  indicated that they chose not to bring in either car because Papaya Rules might have been infringed. That's not what i saw as the biggest problem: I think the biggest problem was pit lane poker, as the old Star Sports commentators used to call it. McLaren's biggest jeopardy in coming in on lap 7 was that it was a foregone conclusion that many other cars would do the same.

McLaren's pit box, as last year's champions, was the nearest to the pit entry. That means that once new tyres were fitted, their cars could not leave their box as any car behind them came into the pits and when they could leave their box, they would be held up by cars further along the pit lane coming out of their boxes. McLaren could easily have been shuffled more than half-way down the pack if they had pitted at that time.

The reason the team gave over the radio was that those who stopped, who therefore were almost locked into a 25+25 lap strategy until the end of the race, was valid. My own reaction was that all of those teams had no margin for error, their own or someone else's, so I agreed with the McLaren strategists' view on that point.

As the race unfolded, there were no dramas. The odd driver was threatened with a penalty for running wide too often, an odd minor collision took out a car with an immediate puncture and there were a few scrapes that annoyed other drivers but the race turned out to be pretty much as expected: a high-speed procession, once the cars had "unbunched" after the Safety Car came in.

By then, largely, McLaren had lost Piastri the race and lost Norris a second place not by more bad decisions but by what, in other times, would have been termed bad luck because it depended on the performance of others in unpredictable circumstances.

The consequences were horrible, and the risk to the Drivers' Championship is Verstappen looming large in the mirror. But that's the nature of risk: you just don't know what you don't, or cannot, know and you cannot take account of every possible variation.

It doesn't matter if that's in motor racing or in financial crime risk awareness.

End of story.

Nigel Morris-Cotterill is a pioneer in the field of financial crime risk strategies and assessment with more than 30 years experience. He coined the phrase "There are no solutions, only better managed risk" more than a quarter of a century ago and in his book, How not to be a money launderer" explained the risk based approach long before the FATF gave it a name. He argues that compliance should be the servant of risk, not its master. His books and courses, including an online course from a critical thinking perspective, empasise his view that financial crime risk must be viewed as part of the world at large and not in isolation.

www.countermoneylaundering.com