This is more of a missjudgement by their part other than a major weakness. It's true they work the tires harder than RBR and Ferrari, but this is manageable to some extent in qualifying. It's the race where it's tough to deal with it. It shouldn't have been like this on a quali session, but oh well, let's see how things pan out the rest of the weekend.Vanja #66 wrote: ↑03 May 2024, 23:36Mclarens were awesome on Mediums. The harder the compound, the higher operating temp window. Softer tyres have to be treated with care on hot tracks, for McLaren this is definitely an issue. Tyres also cool down on straights so they can get back down into window in McLaren's case.FittingMechanics wrote: ↑03 May 2024, 23:32Are you sure? They looked better later in the lap. It almost looks like the tyres were cold and thus they had awful S1 but managed to claw it back after they got some heat into them? If they overcooked them it should be opposite, good S1 and bad later sectors.
Maybe the preparation lap was compromised or they just overestimated how hot it was.
As I said after China, this trait worked in their favour and Norris did a great job taking this opportunity
Yeah makes sense.Emag wrote: ↑03 May 2024, 23:38No guys, the problem is that they are overheating the tires in S1 just after 2-3 corners. The temp spike up and they can no longer provide the grip so the car starts sliding. The reason why S2 and S3 was good, is because after S1 they have a long-ish straight which gives the tires some time to cool-off. Then S2 is quite slow which doesn't heat the tires as much. And then you have another long straight which gives tires even more time to cool-off. So tires were pretty much on point in S3, and Lando has had pretty great straight-line speed with the upgraded car, so the purple S3 is not so surprising.
The reason why I think Lando might have made a mistake, is because he was much slower than Oscar. They both had this inherent problem with the car overheating the softs, but clearly Oscar handled it better.
He also said there is only 1 thing that didn't work, referring to himself.
Sprint is a write-off in my opinion. Best we can hope is to pass Ricciardo and finish behind both RedBulls and Ferarris. Not enough time to do more, but I have been proven wrong in the past. Let's see how the "medium"-run pace is like tomorrow.