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From being the Formula 1 car that was fast everywhere, on any day, on any track, the McLaren looked a little ordinary around the Circuit of The Americas on Friday.
Lando Norris in the quicker of the McLarens ended up over two tenths off the pace in sprint qualifying, while team-mate Oscar Piastri was dumped out in SQ1 after losing his time to track limits.
From being an inconsistent car which Max Verstappen even termed a ‘monster’ (in the bad sense) a few races ago, the Red Bull was good enough for Max to take the sprint pole.
With the 2024 world title fight really depending upon Norris consistently beating Verstappen big in the remaining races, might Friday at Austin represent another inflection point in the story of this season?
Both teams arrived here with significant upgrades – as did Mercedes, for whom George Russell qualified a great second-fastest despite a time-costing moment exiting Turn 1 – but Norris was not particularly impressed with those of the MCL38, saying he felt no benefit.
Ferrari bossed the practice times – and was fastest in SQ1 and SQ2 on the medium tyres. But as the switch to softs was made for SQ3, the Ferrari wasn’t quite as balanced, leaving Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz third and fifth respectively.
Around the Circuit of The Americas, the McLaren was as fast as the Ferrari but definitely slower than the upgraded Red Bull and Mercedes. Norris’ lap wasn’t perfect – he understeered quite wide through the last two corners – but it seemed as if it didn’t have a happy window between speed through the fast Esses in sector 1 and still having good front tyre temperatures at the end of the lap.
On the medium tyres in SQ1 and SQ2, he was consistently a couple of tenths adrift in sector 1 but second-quickest (to Sainz) in the final sector. On the softs in SQ3, Norris carried a lot more speed into the Esses but seemingly at the expense of those front tyres later in the lap.
Although he improved his speed through the Esses by a lot in SQ3, he was still well behind Verstappen through that section. Max’s Red Bull, with its new floor edge treatment and different rear body, was dynamite there, a full 9km/h quicker than the McLaren on the approach to Turn 6.
Notably, Verstappen is using a couple of dabs of braking through there to aid the direction change. Yet that speed through the Esses didn’t overwork the Red Bull’s tyres in the way Norris’ speed did his.
This circuit requires careful management of the soft tyres even on a qualifying lap, and Verstappen seemed to have a great handle on that. He wasn’t the fastest everywhere, but he kept the tyres in shape perfectly, with only a small run-wide at Turn 13 making it a less-than-perfect lap.
“Looking at the lap, there are a few little balance issues to sort out,” said Verstappen, “but to be ahead of the others is really positive. I’m aware that there are a lot of fast cars around me but I’m happy and it’s definitely a positive return.
"Looking to the rest of the weekend, we just want to make the car a bit more driveable and that we are all good on the tyres in the race.”
Through the slow uphill Turns 7 and 8 Norris claws back all the time lost to Verstappen through the Esses – and more. For much of the lap, he is actually ahead of the Red Bull. But the lap just bleeds away horribly in the last two corners. How much of that was Norris’ less-than-perfect tyre management on the lap, how much is the McLaren’s traits? The timing beam didn’t care.
“I’ve been struggling the whole day, honestly,” said Norris afterwards, “with the balance and the set-up. In a way, I’m happy with P4, because I feel like it could have been a lot worse, but my lap was shocking. So yeah, not a terrible day, could have been worse, could have been better.”
Actually the biggest threat to Verstappen was Russell in the Mercedes with the new floor. This car had looked a handful in morning practice as the team set about understanding its new traits but it was brought into a nice sweet spot by the beginning of qualifying.
Lewis Hamilton was second only to Leclerc in SQ1 and, as usual, Hamilton was very quick through the Esses, almost on a par with Verstappen.
The Mercedes responded well to the soft tyre and had Russell not made a slight over-commitment into Turn 1 – giving him a time-costly oversteer moment over the exit kerbs which continued to punish him all the way through Sector 1 – he would conceivably have taken pole rather than been 0.022s off Verstappen.
Hamilton’s lap went wrong with a lock-up at Turn 12, likely from being distracted by flags for a Franco Colapinto spin. Before then, he’d been even faster than Verstappen through sector 1, though how much of a penalty that would have imposed on his tyres through the demanding long turns of the final sector is unknown.
