Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri explain what went wrong for McLaren in qualifying at the Austrian GP as the team, hopeful that their power unit could carry them to the front of the field, ultimately had to settle for no better than sixth on the grid.
Norris led the pair as the defending Formula 1 world champion posted a 1:06.502 to nudge out his Australian counterpart by just 0.009, however the duo found themselves a long way from George Russell’s pole position time.
The Mercedes driver put in a 1:06.113 meaning that the closest McLaren could come to the Silver Arrows was 0.389 – despite them sharing the same engine as the British driver through their customer team status.
And to add to the woes is the fact that Russell had to surrender lap time at Turn 9 with Max Verstappen’s crash bringing out the single-waved yellow flags, forcing him to lift 100 metres before the corner.
He believes this cost him a few tenths thus meaning that McLaren look to be a long way off at a track that should have seen the gap narrow, with 75% of the lap relying on the power unit and spent at 100% throttle.
Zak Brown’s defending constructors’ champions ended the afternoon comfortably slower than Mercedes and Ferrari, and likely Red Bull too as neither could beat Verstappen’s first lap before his crash.
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It’s worth noting that Kimi Antonelli cancelled his own lap in the other Mercedes W17 and was still faster than McLaren, so it was not a case of Russell, a talented one-lap specialist, simply finding gold dust at the end of Saturday.
For Norris, he believes McLaren simply did not have the pace to bother the front teams at the Red Bull Ring, as he explains what he felt went wrong for himself and Piastri in qualifying at the Austrian GP.
“I feel like everyone was probably expecting more, even us,” Norris told media, including Total-Motorsport.com. “We were probably expecting a little bit more just from a positions point of view, but it was very close.
“I think my lap was pretty good. Similar to what Oscar said, it takes a pretty insane lap on a day like today to maybe gain a couple more positions, but those laps don’t come around very often. It’s tricky to get out of the car what we have at the minute.
“So we’re happy to be as close as we were to some of them. We just hoped some of them wouldn’t do a perfect lap and would make a couple of mistakes. That just wasn’t the case today, so we are where we deserve to be.”
Piastri: ‘I overstepped it a little bit’
Meanwhile on Piastri’s side of the garage, the 25-year-old accepts that McLaren likely did not have the pace to challenge Mercedes and the pressure of trying to find extra lap time in a bid to find an extra grid position or two might have cost him.
The driver from Melbourne admits that in his quest to limit the damage on a difficult weekend for the team, he potentially drove over the limit and ironically hurt his own chances of working his way up the order in the latest round of the 2026 F1 season.
“We’ve obviously been very tightly matched, me and Lando. The whole weekend,” Piastri told F1 TV. “I think my last lap wasn’t…
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“There are a few areas where I was pushing hard and maybe overstepped it a little bit, but I don’t think we had the pace to be able to do a whole lot more than that.
“It’s where we are at the moment – we know it, but we’re pushing hard to try and improve.”
