It's common for McLaren to be much harder on it's tyres relative to it's opposition before picking up pace with the fuel load going down while others are losing pace. There's a number of factors in play here and it can be hard to unpick which are most powerful. I think the Pirelli tyre choice favoured Ferrari for starters, they handled the mediums better but I do think because of the slow start they had to the weekend McLaren underestimated the progress the Saturday setup changes had made. By lap 20 Lando's times were coming down and Max was going the other way, the Ferraris - forget it!Mostlyeels wrote: ↑22 Oct 2024, 01:36In the first stint, Piastri said on the radio that his graining cleared up around the time the car started lapping at the same pace as the leaders. It does seem like a problem getting into the window.Emag wrote: ↑21 Oct 2024, 10:12https://i.imgur.com/Y3TI9Yt.png
Really weird first stint. Both McLaren's so slow but here it's Lando vs Leclerc vs Max.
Leclerc and Max both display a normal progression of pace. They start at a certain level, Leclerc a bit faster because he wants to break DRS. Then they both stabilize to a certain level of pace and from there their laptimes get progressively slower the deeper into the stint they go right until they pit.
Lando on the other hand, starts out with horrible performance, getting faster and faster as the stint progresses, until he too (not shown in this graph because it happened a couple of laps later), starts showing signs of tire wear and gets slower before he pits.
Other than those first 15 laps, Lando was on par or faster than Leclerc, discounting the laps stuck behind Max. Hard to gauge the second stint, because of the 5 lap tire delta, but I imagine without that it would have been on par with Leclerc.
Very bizarre car behavior. Perhaps some weird problem with taking too long to get the tires at the right operating window. Maybe an over-correction via the setup in a bid to try and improve the tire wear problems they saw in the sprint.
If it wasn't for that huge slump at the start, Lando would have overcut Max with pace alone, so it's frustrating that they couldn't get the car into the right window. The sprint format really screwed them because they did not hit the ground running from the get-go like RedBull and Ferrari did.
By stint two both McLarens were coming alive. It escaped most people's attention that despite his unhappiness with the setup all weekend Oscar was matching Lando's times, that is catching Max but probably decided to keep a watching brief given all things. The team did a good recovery job from Friday where it looked like we would be poor in qualifying and race pace, certainly vulnerable to the Mercs - imagine P6/7! So I'm pretty impervious to all the whining and huffing and puffing about McLaren dropping the ball, if this was a bad weekend I'll take it. I think Mexico is another chance for podiums even if Ferrari seems to have settled the ship. We need to keep focussed on the WCC, Ferrari will be the big threat there.