Grand Prix qualifying around Shanghai saw Oscar Piastri properly exploit the McLaren in a way that wasn’t possible on Friday thanks to the compromised SQ3 run plan in sprint qualifying.
He secured his first GP pole as a result which is potentially gold dust for his prospects of winning the race, given how much graining everyone’s front tyres were suffering in the sprint and the advantage Lewis Hamilton gave himself in that race by having qualified on pole and won the start.
It was the foundation for Hamilton’s sprint victory, his Ferrari 7s clear of Piastri after just 19 laps. Clear air is going to be even more valuable than usual around this high-grip, long-corner circuit which is just ripping the fronts to shreds.
“Whenever we have front graining, I really struggle,” said Lando Norris, who qualified only third, 0.15s adrift of team mate Piastri, with George Russell’s Mercedes getting between them.
“I’m just not as comfortable in the car as I was in Australia,” continued Norris, “and it’s tricky to put a lap together and be consistent. We’ve still got the quickest car, but I just didn’t do as good a job as Oscar.”
Norris abandoned his final lap after a small error, but it wasn’t about to shade even Piastri’s first run. Piastri in fact was 0.2s down on that on his final lap as he approached the Turn 14 hairpin (the headwind down the long back straight had picked up) and had even considered abandoning too.
Instead Piastri “drove the hairpin of my life,” braking super-late and just making the apex. That and a committed run through the final turn improved upon his previous effort by half-a-tenth. Either lap was good enough for pole.
With the longer Q3 of GP qualifying and the availability of two sets of softs, McLaren didn’t have to the awkward complication of considering a push-cool-push lap, the thing which had tripped them up yesterday. With everyone on the same run plan, the natural order of McLaren’s advantage returned.
But it was by a far narrower margin than what was possible yesterday when a Melbourne-like advantage had looked perfectly feasible. Despite not having to compromise their runs this time, Piastri shaded Russell by just 0.082s. Had Piastri abandoned the last lap, his margin over the Mercedes would have been a scant 0.02s.
Where has McLaren’s Melbourne margin gone?
In FP1, with the resurfaced track not yet rubbered in, the McLaren’s superior rear tyre temperature control was making its performance pattern remarkably similar to that of Australia, with Norris’ handy 0.4s advantage derived mainly in the last sector as everyone else’s rears went beyond the ideal temperature threshold and the McLaren’s didn’t. This remains the MCL39’s big strength.
But the rubbering in of the track moved everyone’s tyre limitation towards the fronts. High entry speeds combined with long corners requiring steering lock to be maintained for a long time make this a very tough challenge for the front tyre. Making it even more so are the very high minimum pressures imposed by Pirelli for this track (26.5 psi initially for the fronts, increased to 27.5psi after Friday) to ensure the tyre’s structure remains safe at such high sustained loads. With a necessarily smaller contact patch imposed by the high pressures, so graining becomes more acute.
“It’s not even about controlling their temperatures,” says Norris. “It’s just graining.” With this as the limitation, the McLaren was merely competitive over a qualy lap, not dominant.
Just like last year, when front graining becomes the issue, the Mercedes is suddenly very quick (think back to Vegas last year and the comparative performance of Mercedes and McLaren there).
That said, Russell’s lap came out of nowhere as his experimentation with preparation laps paid off right at the end. He’d even tried an extra preparation lap on his first Q3 attempt.
“Then we looked at what the [Racing Bulls] were doing because they were very fast,” said Russell.
Analysis: Where Lawson is losing out so much to Verstappen
So for his last run he emulated their slow prep lap, taking an extra 8s, and this time the car came alive. His biggest gain was through the slow Turn 9, where he found almost 0.2s. The prep lap game was such a complex one it bewildered the rookie Kimi Antonelli who, just as yesterday, began his laps with the tyres way out of their window and qualified 0.4s off Russell, back in eighth, one place behind his fellow rookie Isack Hadjar in the superbly balanced Racing Bull.
Yuki Tsunoda, who abandoned his final run after a snap out of Turn 13, lined up ninth in the other RB, just ahead of the Williams of Alex Albon who had no new soft tyres left for Q3.
Hadjar qualified just 0.286s adrift of fourth-fastest Max Verstappen in the Red Bull. The RB doesn’t have the Red Bull’s aero grip, but it has a visibly more pliable balance and through the fast sweeps of the middle sector Tsunoda and Hadjar were third and fourth fastest respectively, Verstappen only sixth.
Getting the RB21 to maintain load at the rear in the long corners as he loads up the front is proving tricky even for Max. At the high grip levels offered by the track, the snaps, when they come, are not nice. Enough to spook Liam Lawson who qualified last, 0.75s adrift of Verstappen in Q1.
Where Ferrari's pace went
So what of Ferrari, where did its pace disappear to?
Specifically, where was the sprint polesitter and race winner Hamilton? How had he slipped from such dominance to qualifying only fifth for the grand prix (albeit still ahead of team mate Charles Leclerc in P6).
Actually, Hamilton was less than 0.1s slower than he’d been in SQ3, all of the difference and more accounted for by the greater headwind on the back straight. It’s just that the McLarens gave a more representative account of themselves today, Russell finally found the way of unlocking the Merc’s gentle way with the front tyres and Max Verstappen, just like Hamilton, did much the same time as the day before.
Only it was a few hundredths faster than Hamilton this time rather than a few hundredths slower. Simply Hamilton’s Ferrari was more quickly into its groove on Friday than the others (including Leclerc). The resultant sprint pole gave Hamilton the clear air that was the most powerful performance factor of all in that race.
In their performance patterns, the McLaren’s downforce is apparent not only in the corner entry speeds but also in being the slowest of the big four at the end of the back straight. The Red Bull is the fastest there, its DRS advantage showing again, followed by the Mercedes and Ferrari, in that order. The Ferrari is, as usual, the fastest into slow corners. The Mercedes is getting out of the corners the best.
No-one has yet tried the hard tyre. The medium was clearly well past its best after 19 laps of the sprint and the race is 56 laps.
So it may be a one-stop or a two, no-one is quite sure. But whichever it is, whoever is running at the front has an even bigger advantage than normal.
It’s Piastri’s race to lose.
