Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri realised they were in trouble in Las Vegas as soon as McLaren got called to the stewards, they revealed in Qatar.
After finishing second and fourth respectively, Norris and Piastri were thrown out of the Las Vegas results after failing scrutineering, with both drivers pulled up for excessive plank wear.
As a result winner Max Verstappen gained a full 25 points on both drivers in the championship, heading into the penultimate weekend in Qatar just 24 points behind leader Norris and level with Piastri.
Speaking ahead of the Qatar weekend in Doha, Norris said the team had a “small expectation” of the impending disqualification as the team debriefed the race at the track.
“There was some small expectation of it already, so it wasn’t like it was a complete shock or out of nowhere,” Norris said. “So, I think we were quite prepared for what the result could be. But I was quite fine [when] I left the track. We did our debrief, we talked about what was good, what was not good. Things that need to be better for here.
“Of course it hurts. There’s a lot of effort that goes into every weekend from everyone and all that effort just felt like it disappeared very quickly. It’s the same feeling for all of us – the mechanics, the engineers, myself. Everyone in McLaren feels let down but actually I found it quite easy just to move on, have a few days off and come to this weekend.”
Lando Norris, McLaren
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / LAT Images via Getty Images
Piastri said he also realised he was in trouble as soon as McLaren was summoned to the stewards, where it unsuccessfully tried to argue there were mitigating circumstances behind its illegal amount of skid wear.
“I knew we were in trouble when we were at the circuit, being called to the stewards,” he said. “When you get called to the stewards for anything, but especially something like that, we try to be optimistic but there’s only a certain amount of optimism you can have. So, I knew we were not in great shape at that point but I officially found out when I was at the airport.”
McLaren team boss Andrea Stella explained the squad was in the dark over the extent of Piastri’s issues due to a sensor failure. In Norris’ case the team did instruct him to ease off, but because the plank problem was caused by excessive bouncing he doesn’t think it made much of a difference.
“It’s not as simple as just lifting more and it just being better,” Norris explained. “Especially because the issue was the purposing. It wasn’t because we were just running low. Sometimes if you lift more, you get more purposing and it’s actually a worse effect.
“It’s the rules, it’s the way it is. I was lifting the whole race so starting any earlier would not have made a difference.”
Piastri added: “I did feel that [porpoising], but there have been certain races through my career where sometimes you feel like you have a lot of grounding and not that much skid wear, sometimes it feels like you don’t have much and you’re wearing through them like crazy, so it depends a little bit from circuit to circuit.
“Definitely, it was not the most comfortable of races in the car but I didn’t realise the extent of how bad it was for skid wear on my car. We had a sensor fail at the start of the race, so we didn’t know exactly how bad it was.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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