Piastri, meanwhile, cut a somewhat forlorn figure. He had a difficult weekend in the US a week ago and thought he had found the answers. But as he put it: “What’s been a bit surprising here has just been that the gap has been the same pretty much every session.<\/p>\n
“I feel like I’ve done some decent laps through the weekend, but everything seems to be about 0.4-0.5secs off.”<\/p>\n
Team principal Andrea Stella said Piastri was losing a little bit everywhere, and Piastri said: “I feel like I did a reasonable job and the car felt reasonable as well. So, yeah, the lack of lap time is a bit of a mystery.”<\/p>\n
Piastri has been off Norris’ pace whether on short runs or long, low fuel or high, so it is more in hope that he said of the race: “If I can unlock the pace in the car, we can have some fun. We’ve just got to try to unlock it.”<\/p>\n
This is now Piastri’s fifth difficult weekend in a row, his form mysteriously evaporating since he won in the Netherlands at the end of August.<\/p>\n
He did not talk directly about what this means for the championship, but there was no hiding the meaning behind one of his comments: “There’s a lot of things I could worry about, but ultimately being that far off when you feel like you’ve done a reasonable job is a difficult place to be. And so that’s my biggest concern at the moment.”<\/p>\n
Stella said that the conditions in Mexico, like those in Austin, are ones in which Norris thrives and Piastri is less comfortable – low grip, hot tyres.<\/p>\n
And he said that “every evidence, every piece of data, every indirect measurement of information we have, tells us that there is no problem with the car”.<\/p>\n
He added that it was “good” for McLaren to be able “to confirm that we can have the fastest car”, adding that their “focus is to stop the momentum of Verstappen”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Piastri, meanwhile, cut a somewhat forlorn figure. He had a difficult weekend in the US a week ago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-226010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}