“We just fall into that window where we just struggle a lot on the tyres and we don’t seem to really be able to keep up. Those final laps of Oscar [Piastri] in the sprint, I need to cut a corner to do that.”
In his reflections of the sprint race pace from the McLarens, Max Verstappen did not sound especially hopeful about his chances of delivering equivalent race laps. Indeed, Piastri had the advantage from clean air; Qatar’s series of long and fast corners might be a dream scenario for the drivers, but rarely do such corners contribute to good races. It’s incredibly difficult to follow through those corners since adhesion is king, and a car loses around 20-30% of its downforce when following in the wake of another.
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