Red Bull Ring, Saturday, 27 June
Find out what happened during FP3 and Qualifying in Austria, and get the thoughts of McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Drivers Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri, and Team Principal Andrea Stella.
McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team finished today’s Qualifying in the heat of Spielberg with the Number 1 car in P6 and the Number 81 car in P7. This demonstrated that despite taking to a circuit with different characteristics than those experienced in Barcelona, the competitive picture remained closely matched, with only fine margins separating the leading teams.
Today’s Qualifying result, therefore, reflects the team’s current competitive position. Both drivers extracted the maximum from the MCL40’s current package with an acknowledgement that there remains a performance gap to the leading teams. The entire team, both trackside and in Woking, however, remains confident that the progress being made at the factory with patience will enable the team to consistently fight for Pole positions and race wins in the near future.
Free Practice 3, as is often the case, and particularly when track temperature is changing, was slow to start, with only one car circulating in the first 10 minutes, the rest waiting for the track to move a little closer to the conditions that would be seen in practice. Lando went out 15 minutes into the session, and Oscar 18 minutes. The big question was whether any of the presumptive top four teams would choose to use a Hard tyre or retain both sets for the race. Lando and Oscar both stuck with the consensus, using two sets of Soft tyres during the session. Both did multiple runs on each set, either doing a double-cool between laps, or returning to the garage.
The front-runners appeared tightly bunched after FP3, and as has been the way this season, made progress through Q1 relatively straightforward. Lando started with a strong lap that left him P2 after the first runs – but he picked up a little damage to one of the rear brake ducts. He stayed in the garage for the rest of the session due to a strong lap, meaning he didn’t need to run again while it was glued. Oscar’s first lap had room for improvement, and he went out again on a used tyre, but was able to abort his second run and return to the garage ahead of the Chequered Flag as the initial lap deemed him safe.
Q2 was more of the same. Oscar did a single run at the start of the session on a new tyre, and with a strong time, was able to stay in the garage for the rest of the session. Lando, having been in the garage for a while, elected to do a lap on a used tyre first. He then did a second run at the end of the session on a new tyre. Oscar finished the session seven-thousandths ahead of Lando.
Between the sessions, Lando’s crew used the time to replace his damaged rear brake duct, fast work getting the job done in time for the session. Both drivers had achieved the goal across Q1 and Q2, getting through those sessions using just two sets of Softs, leaving the final two sets for two attempts in Q3. Oscar had a strong opener, but Lando was a little off the pace. The tightness of the field magnified any slight twitch or slide. Both improved on their final runs: Lando finishing the session P6 and Oscar P7, separated by just nine-thousandths of a second. Consensus in the garage was that those were good laps, extracting the pace the MCL40 had to offer.
This is more or less where the team expected to be. Attention now turns to tomorrow. With a gap of just a tenth and a half to the front row, combined with an expectation of high degradation and multiple stops, the anticipation is for a competitive performance in Austria.
In the McLaren Driver Development Programme, having qualified P22, Matteo De Palo finished P19 in the FIA Formula 3 Sprint. The race was interrupted by a Safety Car at the start and a VSC later – but with track temperatures rising rapidly, tyre life played the biggest role in the result.