Max exposes misfiring McLaren; Piastri move that ‘annoyed’ rivals explained — Talking Pts

There’s an old truism in Formula 1 that a driver loses 0.3 seconds for every child they have.

Max Verstappen has taken less than a week to totally dispel it.

Just days after welcoming his first daughter, Lily, into the world, Verstappen has embarrassed the pole-favourite McLaren drivers with his third pole in four grands prix.

If he really was missing 0.3 seconds, then really we should call his 0.065-second advantage total domination.

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It was another remarkable showing from the reigning world champion, who has refused to allow his slower car to prevent him from attempting to mount a title defence.

And with rain on the radar on Sunday — after a tropical downpour delayed the sprint earlier on Saturday — there’s every chance he can convert for his second victory of the season and provide us with yet another twist in the campaign narrative.

McLAREN EXECUTION DROPS THIRD POLE IN FOUR RACES

While it’s clear McLaren’s single-lap advantage is not nearly as significant as its advantage in race pace, it has just enough in hand to lock out the front row if it executes cleanly.

Unfortunately for the team, clean execution has been lacking this season.

Verstappen has taken three poles off McLaren in the last four rounds. Only in Saudi Arabia did he genuinely have the pace — by a fine margin, but nonetheless — to take pole when you analyse each driver’s best sectors.

But if you added each driver’s best three sectors together in Japan, McLaren should’ve beaten Red Bull Racing to top spot.

That was the case in Miami again, where subpar execution opened the door wide to Verstappen.

Adding the best sector times together shows McLaren, particularly with Norris at the wheel, had a decisive advantage.

Ideal lap times

1. Lando Norris: 1:26.016

2. Oscar Piastri: 1:26.173

3. Max Verstappen: 1:26.204

4. Andrea Kimi Antonelli: 1:26.271

“I think that the car definitely had the pace to lock in the first row today,” McLaren principal Andrea Stella told Sky Sports. “But we need to execute, we need to be accurate — but it’s not as easy as we think.

“Oscar was actually not able to improve in Q3 with two attempts. I think he got a little bit off the rhythm in Q3, and this track with the wind and the long straight is a bit tricky.

“Lando was flowing very well, in fairness, until the last corner — one attempt we were a little too long, one attempt we were a little too short. But actually Lando drove very well in Q3.”

As an explanation, Stella pointed to the difficult handling characteristics baked into the car that become apparent when the drivers are pushing the limit in qualifying. It’s something Norris has struggled with particularly — though the Briton said he was feeling much more comfortable this weekend compared to his difficulties in previous rounds — but Piastri hasn’t been immune from making small errors in Q3, as was the case this weekend.

“It’s something we’re working on,” he said. “We’ve always said our car was more predictable and suitable in race trim. It’s performing very well — it’s strong, it’s fast — but to drive it at the limit it offers little surprises here and there.

“While we could’ve locked out the first row, I think it’s still a solid qualifying session.

“It’s a good position for tomorrow. The car is very strong in race trim. Qualifying is not ideal, but it’s good, and that’s the starting point for tomorrow.”

MORE PIASTRI BAD LUCK GIVES NORRIS CRUCIAL BOOST

For the second race in Miami in a row, Piastri had an almost certain victory snatched from him by the unfortunate timing of a safety car.

Remember that Piastri led last year’s Miami Grand Prix but pitted just one lap before a safety car, flipping Norris into the lead and precipitating a series of events that had the Australian punted out of the points.

It was Norris’s maiden grand prix victory, but it could have been — perhaps should have been — Piastri’s first.

The circumstances were remarkably similar in the sprint, albeit this time McLaren was enjoying an exclusive battle for first place.

Piastri led the way at the start, and while Norris closed onto the back of him as the track dried and as their intermediate tyres wore away, the Australian maintained the lead and therefore pit priority.

He was brought in first for slicks, which should have guaranteed him an comfortable lead once Norris pitted on the following lap.

But with impeccable timing Liam Lawson punted Fernando Alonso into the barriers, triggering a safety car just as Norris entered pit lane.

With Piastri and the rest of the field lapping at caution pace, Norris was able to rejoin the race with the lead — and, as a bonus, the sprint ended behind the safety car to ensure he couldn’t be challenged.

Norris outscored Piastri by a point — his deficit is now down to just nine points — but more valuable was him breaking the trend of beatings dished out to him by his teammate.

This was a morale booster, and with Norris subsequently beating Piastri in qualifying, it could prove pivotal to turning the tide back in his favour.

“It’s a boost. Every little thing, every point, is a good thing,” he said. “Even yesterday when I was third [qualifying for the sprint] I was so happy with the lap.

“This weekend has been a good one. I’ve been happy with everything — with the car, with myself, with the performances. I’ll just keep chipping away.”

ANTONELLI RUES PIASTRI MOVE — BUT IT WAS CLEARLY LEGAL

Andrea Kimi Antonelli was the story of Friday when he took sprint pole, but the sprint race itself couldn’t have gone much worse, with a bad first lap and pit stop calamity initially dropping him out of the points before he was promoted to seventh by post-race penalties for others.

But the Italian and his Mercedes team were particularly aggrieved about his battle at the first corner, where a fractionally better start got Piastri ahead and into the lead by claiming the apex. Antonelli ended up off the road and dropping to fourth.

The stewards noted the incident but decided no investigation was required.

“I’m a bit annoyed about lap one with how it went,” Antonelli told Sky Sports. “It seems like it’s like this, that you can basically do whatever you want — so it’s good to know for the future.”

Team boss Toto Wolff went further.

“I don’t think we are setting good precedents,” he told Sky Sports. “You are just releasing the brake and then you are just pushing the other guy off. It’s for the junior formulas also.

“I think you need to leave a car’s space. It’s kind of crept in — turn 1, you push them out.”

But while Antonelli can be forgiven as a rookie, Wolff should know that this isn’t lax umpiring, it’s what the drivers asked for.

The rule that allowed Piastri to claim the corner in Miami — and even in Saudi Arabia a fortnight ago — was introduced at the behest of drivers in response to Max Verstappen’s overzealous around-the-outside defending last year.

“If you’re able to stay on the circuit, you are in your right to run the driver wide, as it has been for all of us since go-karting,” Grand Prix Drivers Association director — and Mercedes driver — George Russell said late last year. “If you’re overtaking somebody on the inside, you’ve got the right to run them wide.”

“Right now there is a line of regulation that says the inside driver needs to leave room to the guy on the outside from the apex to the exit.

“I think that’s going to be getting binned off, and I hope it’s going to be from this weekend onwards.”

And so it was, with new driving guidelines in effect this season, with Piastri maximising them in the last two rounds.

But all of this is irrelevant anyway. Antonelli wasn’t pushed off the track at all.

The Italian attempts to squeeze Piastri onto the apex to spook him into compromising his line — completely fair.

But then he bails out and takes to the run-off zone.

He doesn’t cling to Piastri’s outside and find himself run out of road; he pre-emptively opens the steering and sails off the road, where the waterlogged run-off area drops him down to fourth.

Even in a situation where Piastri might have had a case to answer, Antonelli didn’t put himself in a position to argue the point.

Piastri’s move was hard but fair. Antonelli made a mistake. To say anything else is disingenuous.

HAMILTON PLEASURE AND PAIN (AGAIN)

The highlight of Lewis Hamilton’s season remains his victory in the Shanghai sprint, and the Briton came close to replicating that outlying result in Miami again this weekend.

The Briton was running an uninspiring sixth in the sprint when he decided to roll the dice on an early change to slicks. His experience ensured he judged the switch perfectly. By the time the rest of the field had followed him in, he had rocketed up to third place behind only the McLaren drivers.

On a tough weekend for Ferrari and after a tough opening five rounds, a sprint podium was enough to break some of the gloom surrounding the seven-time champion’s move to Maranello.

“I think it’s definitely been not so great, obviously, since China, but looking at it, you can definitely see perhaps why we’ve been in the position that we’re in,” he said.

“Coming into this weekend we’ve made some changes, but we have more to do in order to be fighting more consistently at the front, so we just need to knuckle down.

“I do believe that we can get some better results, so I’m hoping I can get the car in a better place today or this afternoon.”

But the sprint podium looks certain to be the highlight of his weekend, because much like in Shanghai, things immediately began falling apart.

Ferrari struggled through qualifying, and Hamilton was the worst affected of its drivers, getting himself knocked out in Q2.

It’s the first time this season he’s failed to qualify inside the top 10.

After sounding relatively chipped after the sprint, his familiar pessimism returned.

“It’s always a surprise every session you go out what the car’s doing,” he said. “It’s a bit of a mess at the moment balance-wise. Unfortunate to have not got through. Same old.”

As a remarkable aside, he’s now been outqualified by Carlos Sainz — the man he replaced at Ferrari and sent down the grid to Williams — in each of the last three grands prix.

To be fair to Hamilton, this was his smallest deficit to Leclerc all season, sitting at just 0.058 seconds when he was eliminated from Q2.

The underlying story of qualifying is really that Ferrari is suffering a shocker this weekend, this being its worst performance in terms of pure pace since the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc was particularly unhappy with the car’s lack of performance after just squeaking through to eighth.

“It is frustrating,” he said, per Autosport. “To be honest, even more frustrating is that this weekend I felt like we are maximising the potential of the car.

“It’s just that the potential of the car is just not there. Today in qualifying I felt very satisfied with my lap, but it’s only bringing us whatever it is, P8 or something.

“We are just not fast. Whatever we do with the car — we can run it in different ways, but we just don’t have the downforce that the others have at the moment.”

It’s a grim assessment for a team that started the year hoping to contend for the title and a reminder that while Hamilton is underperforming, he’s far from Ferrari’s biggest problem.