Oscar Piastri didn’t feel like he over-stepped at Las Vegas GP start, as Andrea Stella notes on McLaren’s characteristics that hurt them in the grand prix.
Even though the 5s time penalty didn’t actually hurt McLaren’s Piastri as much in Las Vegas GP due to their inherent lack of pace, the Australian didn’t like he over-stepped for an out of line start. The stewards adjudged that he placed his car outside the designated white line.
That was enough to hit the sensor and result in a penalty. Despite that, he initially lost a place to Nico Hulkenberg at the start but quickly got back on him. But post that, he was stuck behind train of cars and managed to recover the 5s during the race to slot himself on the tail of the Top 6.
The gap allowed Lando Norris to pit for the fastest lap, but on the overall basis, it wasn’t a good race for either of the McLaren cars. “I’ve not seen it but I didn’t feel like I did anything different or overshot it,” said Piastri. “But I mean, clearly I must have been a bit out. It made a little bit of an impact at the start after the first pit-stop, but that was nowhere near the biggest problem.
“It was a pretty poor [weekend]. I think qualifying, we’ve got some ideas why it didn’t really come to us in Q3. But the race, I think was more difficult than we expected. Especially on my side, it was a much, much more difficult race with the tyres than I expected going in.
“We knew it would be tough with graining, but the graining was a lot worse than I feared. That part was quite unexpected, so I think we need to understand why,” summed up Piastri. McLaren team boss Stella acknowledged the characteristics of the car which has hurt them in the long run as Norris suggested.
It is down to front limitation and something that has been there for years. “Yeah, I think there’s some McLaren characteristics that we have improved over time,” started Stella. “Definitely we have been able to deliver a competitive car that can win races but can win races in a certain kind of circuit, right?
“And some of these inherent limitations, especially with the behaviour of the front end still sometimes pop out when track layout or grip level or downforce level mean that you need to get a certain response from the front end and at the moment this response from the front end we are not able to offer to our drivers.
“And this is also why I say that looking at the final state in which the car came more alive and the lap times were competitive, definitely we approached things in a slightly more aggressive way. We didn’t change the fundamental nature of the car, but we kind of really forced to remove the limitation at the front and it seemed to make the lap times more competitive,” summed up Stella.
Here’s Max Verstappen, Christian Horner on Lando Norris
Here’s Lando Norris, Andrea Stella on Max Verstappen
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