‘I’m letting the team down’ 

With a possible world title at stake, the McLaren intra-team battle between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris is beginning to take shape. So far it’s been characterised by Piastri’s flat-line consistency and calmness and Norris’s more mercurial performances. Partly this reflects their respective personalities but there is also a trait in the current car which Norris is finding unsettling.

“I have been slow this whole weekend,” he said in Bahrain after qualifying only sixth. “I have just been off it. The car is amazing. I have nothing to complain about, the team are doing an amazing job but I am just letting them down. I feel like I’ve just never driven a Formula 1 car before. Struggling a lot. I need to try and find answers… I’m not able to do any of the laps like I was doing last season. There I knew every single corner, everything that was going to happen with the car, how it was going to happen. I felt on top of the car.”

However, Piastri also played a part in Norris’s disappointing grid position. They’d been running consecutively on their final Q3 out-laps, Piastri ahead, albeit with plenty of space between them. In waiting until very late in that lap to begin pushing, Piastri delayed Norris – who was obliged to back off further to create a gap. So on front tyres under-temperature as he began the lap, Norris understeered into Turn 1, oversteered out and dropped over 0.2sec right there.

Norris was much quicker in Jeddah a week later and setting the pace but disastrously crashed in Q3, switching the momentum to Piastri who duly won the race. Team boss Andrea Stella acknowledged how Norris’s struggle with the car’s feedback loop may have played its part in his accident. “When Lando tries to squeeze a few more milliseconds out of the car it doesn’t respond as he expects… It’s an episode that I think starts from some of the work that we have done on the car, which has made it faster, but I think it took something away from Lando in terms of predictability of the car once he pushes the limit. So it’s a responsibility of the team to try and improve the car, and to try and correct this behaviour because we want Lando to be confident…

“These cars are so fast, they are so demanding in terms of just adopting a very natural driving style. Because these cars are too fast to think; you either kind of get what you anticipate from the car, or you’re going to be slow. And Lando doesn’t accept to be slow. So it’s our responsibility to make sure that we give him a car that is at the level of his talent.”