Piastri back on top as tables turn at McLaren; Verstappen in 441-day first: Talking Points

It’s taken the better part of three months, but Oscar Piastri has finally had a clean build-up to and run through qualifying.

The result is pole position for the Qatar sprint race.

If it’s not already too late, momentum might be swinging back towards the Australian at the latest possible moment to save his championship bid.

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With teammate and title leader Lando Norris starting third and championship challenger Max Verstappen lining up sixth, Piastri has a vital chance to pinch back a few points in the sprint and being applying some pressure again at the climax of the season.

PIASTRI BACK ON POLE AFTER THREE-MONTH SLUMP

“It’s nice to be back on top.”

It’s been 90 days since Piastri last lined up on pole position — since Sunday at the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August.

In every qualifying — sprint or grand prix — since then he’s been knocked out on the second row or lower.

It’s difficult to believe after the Australian went no more than two rounds without a front-row start before the mid-season break, such has been the depth of his late-season slump.

Qatar was always earmarked as a rebound race, albeit few thought the rebound would have to wait this long.

This is Piastri territory, though not simply because the warmer track surface offers more grip after weeks racing on slippery circuits.

In dividing up the strengths of the McLaren drivers, Piastri tends to be stronger at circuits where fast corners predominate. He has more confidence in the car at higher speeds and through rapid changes in direction. Qatar is all about fast corners.

Norris, on the other hand, tends to have an edge on technical circuits dominated by slow-speed corners. Lusail doesn’t really feature any turns that fall into that category, though generally he’s at his best in Lusail in the slower speed bends.

It’s not surprising, then, that Piastri looked comfortably on the pace throughout both Friday sessions.

“It’s been a good day,” he said. “I think from the first lap we’ve looked competitive, and we made some good adjustments into qualifying and everything felt good.

“I think the last lap was pretty solid except for one pretty big moment, but clearly it was good enough still.

“[Winning everything] is all I can do, and I started on the right note, so hopefully we can keep that going.”

That said, the stopwatch showed little to pick between the drivers, and Piastri’s advantage isn’t so great that he was impervious to pressure.

Both his laps were a little scruffy, though Norris’s were scruffier.

Comparing their first runs of SQ3 — the only two directly comparable given Norris’s difficulty on his second lap — shows Piastri struggling a little through turns 4 and 5, including a full lift off the throttle at turn 5 that drops him to 0.1 seconds behind his teammate.

Norris, however, flounders in the last corner, where a correction on exit gives Piastri his slender advantage at the finish line.

Piastri’s second attempt sees him improve pretty much everywhere except for turn 4, where a mighty corner-entry snap costs him almost 0.1 seconds on its own. He also ran deep at the final corner, costing him more time.

He improved by 0.186 seconds with his second attempt; it suggests there was around 0.3 seconds or more of improvement on offer for him had his lap been clean, which would have painted a more comfortable picture of pole position.

But it’s telling that after weeks of finding himself on the wrong end of 50-50 moments, this weekend he’s found himself ahead in the one percenters.

It’s too early in the weekend to say for certain, but it feels like things are finally swinging back in Piastri’s favour.

PIT TALK PODCAST: McLaren left Las Vegas with no points after having both cars disqualified for running illegally low. With winner Max Verstappen now just 24 points behind Lando Norris is the drivers title at risk this weekend in Qatar?

SCRAPPY NORRIS LEAVES FRONT ROW VACANT FOR RUSSELL

Perhaps also telling is that on this occasion Norris was the McLaren driver caught out by circumstance.

The Englishman was at least in the ballpark to challenge for pole, having been only 0.044 seconds off the pace after his first SQ3 lap.

Then preparation for his final run got complicated.

Whereas Piastri perfectly found his position on track as the third-last car and started his final lap with a clear track ahead, Norris took too long to mark his territory, and Alex Albon, eager to get some clear air for himself, passed him late on the warm-up lap.

They were the last two cars on the track, which meant Norris didn’t have time to hang back further to make more space. He had to start his lap with Albon directly ahead of him or abandon the attempt altogether.

In the end it made no difference. Thanks in part to Albon’s dirty air and in part to a generally scrappy lap, he failed to improve, and a wide moment at the last corner had the lap deleted anyway.

“That’s life,” Norris said. “The pace was there, I just made a mistake at the last corner on my first lap and didn’t put it together.”

Worse, though, was that Norris’s failure to improve opened the door wide to an excellent George Russell to pinch second on the grid.

The Mercedes driver hasn’t started from the front row since his Singapore pole, and he got within just 0.032 seconds of usurping Piastri.

Even though Russell has form at this track — he missed sprint pole and grand prix pole last year by an average of 0.059 seconds — this was a performance that surprised even him.

“I was P14 in practice,” he said. “For a while I haven’t had a good session, so I was pretty happy to get a couple of good laps under my belt, and I was always there or thereabouts throughout the session, so that was nice.”

The Mercedes is generating lap time in a very different way to the McLaren. Clearly running with less downforce, it was faster down every straight.

But Russell couldn’t live with Piastri through the fastest corners — in fact he shipped almost 0.3 seconds through the triple-apex turn 12-13-14, with only Piastri’s mistake at the final corner shrinking the deficit to less than 0.1 seconds.

That could be worse news for Norris. With few overtaking opportunities around the track, the first turn at the end of the pit straight will be his best shot at making progress — but he may not have the straight-line speed to get it done.

“It’s impossible to overtake, so I think I’m probably going to finish P3, but if I can at least get George off the line or something, that’s probably the most I can hope for,” he said.

“I’m stupid to not try and win; I’m here to try and win. I’ll see what I can find overnight and see what we can do for tomorrow.”

VERSTAPPEN JUST SURVIVING, TSUNODA TURNS UP UNEXPECTEDLY

While sprint qualifying was imperfect for Norris, it was almost disastrous for Verstappen, who ended the session sixth and 0.473 seconds off the pace.

Though he was reasonably competitive through the first sector, the higher speed final two sectors were painful, with the Dutchman complaining of excessive bouncing threatening to tip the car out of control.

The entire Friday, from practice through to sprint qualifying, was riddled with handling complaints from the reigning champion in what feels like a repeat of his struggles in Brazil earlier this year, where it took a pit lane start to get the car in its sweet spot for Sunday.

Despite that recovery, his Sao Paulo weekend is what ended his championship bid before McLaren’s double disqualification in Las Vegas.

“From the first lap I had just really bad bouncing and very aggressive understeer that would shift into oversteer at high speed,” he said. “It’s just not what you want to go fast.

“With this balance tomorrow, in the sprint at least, it will not be a lot of fun. It will be more about just trying to survive, I guess, and make some changes going into [grand prix] qualifying.”

How tough was qualifying for Verstappen?

For the first time this season — for the first time since qualifying for last year’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, in fact, 441 days ago — he was outqualified by his teammate.

Tsunoda was simply faster around the lap, and though there’s an asterisk over Verstappen having possibly picked up floor damage at the start of SQ3, this was clearly a much better performance from the under-fire Japanese star.

“So far it’s been a clean race weekend,” he said. “No issues happened in practice and qualifying so far — something that I feel [gave me] more confidence into qualifying.

“I just have to put it all together. There are three more sessions to go. But I’m sure especially now it’s very important for the team, especially for Max.

“I’m happy with the car and with my confidence. Obviously there’s a bit to go for tomorrow to find the extra tenths, but I’m excited.”

Unfortunately for Tsunoda, he’s turned up way too late to save his seat.

Isack Hadjar is expected to take his seat at Red Bull Racing next year, and both he and Tsunoda have suggested they’ve been told this will be the case.

Undecided, however, is whether Tsunoda will replace Liam Lawson at Racing Bulls or drop off the grid altogether. This question is believed to still be live.

Tsunoda’s performance — assuming he can sustain it — may not be in vain just yet.

PIRELLI WARNS OF MORE TYRE DRAMA AS CUTS EMERGE ON RUBBER

Teams will be busy crunching the numbers on laps completed on their tyres ahead of Sunday’s lap-limited Qatar Grand Prix.

No tyre will be allowed to complete more than 25 laps in the 57-lap race as a safety precaution given this circuit’s propensity to rapidly wear away the tread.

After practice, it’s clear that the hard tyre will not be favoured for the sprint or the grand prix. While it has the durability, it doesn’t have the pace on the medium.

Those who qualified for SQ2, however, could find themselves at a disadvantage come Sunday.

Each driver gets four sets of mediums on a sprint weekend, but the rules require a fresh set be used in SQ1 and SQ2. The top 15, therefore, will have already used two sets. Drivers set between seven and eight laps in SQ1 — around a third of the maximum allowed — and between five and six laps in SQ2, which is around a quarter of the limit.

The medium tyre will be favoured by in the sprint too, which will put 19 laps on the set — which means new tyres, not used ones, will have to be used.

That will leave most drivers with just one set of fresh mediums for the race, leaving them to contemplate whether the soft is worth a gamble, whether a used medium has enough life in it, or whether they risk the hards.

The race could be shaken up by which drivers have been most frugal with their rubber.

There could be one more twist in store too.

On Friday night Pirelli reported that several tyres had been returned with deep cuts into the tread that in some cases reached down to the carcass, though none of them failed.

The suspicion is that gravel being dragged onto the kerbs and the circuit is the culprit — and the gravel in Qatar, newly installed at several corners, appears to be sharp rather than rounded, as is the case at other tracks.

At the moment Pirelli isn’t foreshadowing stricter lap limits like those employed in 2023, when the kerbs themselves were damaging the tyres.

But with several instances of drivers dipping wheels into the stones and spitting them onto the track in a puff of dust, there could yet be another twist in this story.