MONDAY MORNING DEBRIEF: From being assured of podiums to P10 – what went wrong for McLaren in Las Vegas?
The McLaren MCL60 was not at its best in the new Las Vegas, and the team that has posed the biggest threat to Max Verstappen’s Red Bull of late returned with just 10th place and the fastest lap, without finishing a single car. First quarter selection.
What happened to the car that a week ago was Verstappen’s only challenger in Brazil and led the sprint race?
“We know our car doesn’t perform well in slow corners,” concluded McLaren CEO Zach Brown after McLaren’s very disappointing qualifying session. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastre failed to pass the first quarter, finishing in 16th and 18th places, respectively.
This is an obvious conclusion, but the problem is deeper. Although it didn’t perform the best on a downhill circuit (the Monza-spec wings aren’t very effective as the team focused on developing the wings found on “normal” circuits), it still performed impressively. To get over it.
By the second and third trimesters. The challenge was combining the setup with the unusual tire demands of a cold circuit with slow corners and long straights.
For the most part, the McLaren is top of the line when it comes to achieving front tire speed, but not quite at the level of the lower wings. In Las Vegas, everyone had trouble with the front right tightening up because of the soft tires.
This will usually render him useless after 4 turns. Normally this would be enough to complete a representative lap, but McLaren experienced a difference in tire behavior between practice and Q1, team principal Andrea Stella explained after qualifying.
“The fact that we didn’t do well set us back because we were trying to squeeze some performance out of the car. Made some changes since yesterday, finally adding performance. But we haven’t done enough because we still don’t understand how to use the tires for qualifying.
“At 3 FP we saw that Oscar’s third lap was very fast and he was just as fast in the fourth lap as he was in the third. So we convinced ourselves that the tires could repeat the lap time and that was the plan for Q1. As I was opening the third lap I could tell my tires were flat, but it was too late for the pits.
“So the main reason we got knocked out in the first quarter was certainly not the performance of the car, but the selection in terms of tire usage and the execution of the plan in the first quarter was not ideal.”
“We had tire damage like I’ve never seen before,” Piastri said. “Honestly, the car wasn’t bad. “If we overcome that, I think we have a chance to do well in the third quarter as well,” he said.
As handling improves, purchasing a second set of tires will bring both cars into the second quarter. However, there were other cars that led more laps. Especially Ferrari, Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso. However, they were 1.1 seconds, 0.7 seconds and 0.3 seconds faster respectively. There was also no window small enough for the front tires to work on soft ground.
At Monza, the last track to use this level of wing, the McLaren was around 0.7 seconds slower than the Ferrari. The difference was greater here, perhaps due to the lack of mid-speed cornering, where the McLaren was stronger and the Ferrari less weak.
Given the lack of known aerodynamic properties at this wing level, McLaren could try to compensate with a lower ride height. Lando Norris’ biggest crash of the race came on lap 3 shortly after the end of the VSC due to slow driving, his tire pressures were very low and his fuel load was still very high.
This, of course, contributed to the car going over the bump and Norris losing control. But once the race started, Piastri made an impressive move through the field.
The hard tires he started with didn’t have much effect on the grain and he was able to ride for a long time before switching to medium tires. This plan backfired when a tire rubbing incident with Lewis Hamilton resulted in both cars having flat tires.
Piastre had to be replaced in round 16. It is too early to move to the middle. This resulted in two shutdowns and the installation of a new set of hard drives.
This allowed him to once again make an impressive pass through the field, showing enough speed to show that the car could gain a good position at the front.
He ran fourth and still set a fast lap, leaving the mid transition as late as possible, hoping for a safety car and pit stop to save time.
He dropped to 11th with seven laps to go, but with the new performance advantage of his tyres, he climbed back to 10th and set the fastest lap of the race. Two points was better than none, but by recent standards it could be considered a very disappointing weekend for the team.
