McLaren will review why Oscar Piastri struggled for performance relative to Lando Norris during the United States Grand Prix, as the championship leader saw his advantage cut to 14 points.
Norris secured a spot on the front row and showed race pace comparable to winner Max Verstappen for a significant section of the race, but was limited to second place after a long battle with Charles Leclerc. Piastri, by contrast, qualified sixth and finished a distant fifth, with his fastest lap nearly a second slower than Norris, and team principal Andrea Stella acknowledges it wasn’t the Australian’s strongest weekend.
“This is certainly one of the most important points that we need to review, which is the fact that Oscar in qualifying and in the race, seemed to have a couple of tenths that he was not able to fully realize, and that possibly was available in the car,” Stella said.
“We are actually now checking that we are completely happy with the set-up of the car, the set-up of the floor, that everything is as intended from a car point of view.
“At the same time, we’ll be looking at the driving. I think we know with Oscar that when the conditions are such that we have low grip, you really need to challenge the car, lean on the understeer, oversteer, locking… This is an area of his driving that has an opportunity to improve, and in Oscar’s standards, this means that he we will improve pretty fast.
“I think today we got quite a lot of information that adds to the information we got yesterday. Already [pre-race], we had some conversations with Oscar as to what we can we can do to extract more. So I think this is just data to learn, and Oscar will learn pretty soon.”
Stella believes McLaren might have left some performance on the table by running its car marginally too high, as it lacked data from the Sprint when both drivers crashed out.
“It’s about ride heights and it’s about missing references to actually exploit fully what is allowed,” he said. “And a track like COTA, which we know has caught out some teams in the past, is one of those in which it’s very difficult to actually nail the last millimeter if you don’t have references coming from real running.
“Simulation can take you only to a certain point, then you need track data to actually go to the last millimeter.”