McLaren have been a team on the up in the second half of the 2023 Formula 1 season. They have scored the most points after Red Bull and Lando Norris has racked up podiums for fun. However, at the Las Vegas GP Qualifying, their momentum came crashing down. Both their cars went out in Q1. Lando Norris finished 16th and Oscar Piastri finished 19th in a session the Papaya Team would like to forget.
A Terrible Build-up
The Las Vegas GP didn’t treat McLaren well from the beginning. They were consistently struggling for pace during the extended FP2 session. After some setup changes overnight, they did do better in the FP3 session.
Oscar Piastri finished 2nd in the session while Lando Norris finished 11th. However, despite a decent performance, they were nervously entering the Las Vegas GP Qualifying.
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A Horrible Strategy
The Las Vegas GP Qualifying was dominated by a mixture of tyre warmup cycles. Some went for a single cooldown lap, some went for multiple. However, one thing that was certain was the track evolution.
As more and more rubber went down on the Las Vegas GP Circuit, the times kept tumbling. This caught McLaren out. At the end of Q1, Oscar Piastri was doing the 8th lap on his soft tyres which had clearly given up.
Meanwhile, Lando Norris wasn’t even on the track. He was in the pits because McLaren thought they were safe.
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Run Plan behind early exit, says Andrea Stella
As reported by Motorsport, McLaren Boss Andrea Stella said that both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri got knocked out in Q1 of the Las Vegas GP due to a bad run plan, and not a bad car.
He said, “In FP3, we saw with Oscar that actually the third lap was faster and he was on a fourth lap in which he was as fast as the third.”
“So, we convinced ourselves that the tyres could have repeated the lap time and that was the plan into Q1.”
“At the time we opened the third lap, we realised that the tyres were going off, but then it was too late to pit.
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