Oscar Piastri regretfully admitted that McLaren would have ended up seventh in Qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix “no matter what” they changed, in what was a frustrating session ahead of their 1000th Grand Prix.
Both Piastri and his team mate Lando Norris grew used to appearing outside of the top five during Free Practice in Monaco, but there was some hope that they would find performance ahead of the all-important Qualifying hour.
However, while the other frontrunners at Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari all cut down their times throughout Q3, McLaren struggled to keep up and Piastri was forced to settle for P7 – over half a second adrift of Kimi Antonelli’s pole position lap.
Asked whether it was the best result he could have achieved, he replied: “I think maybe there was a tiny bit more lap time out there but I think we were going to be seventh no matter what today.
“We struggled with the balance yesterday. Today the car has actually felt a little bit nicer but we’re just lacking grip, it looks like, compared to the others. Not much you can do about it.
“For sure it’s been a bit of a surprise. We didn’t think we would be amazing here, but not as bad as it has been. Definitely some things to look into.”
After joining Piastri as the first of the final 10 out on track, Norris endured a similarly frustrating conclusion to Qualifying when a small error impacted his second run, leaving him to start alongside his team mate on the fourth row as he wound up in eighth place.
He revealed that even without the mistake, the advantage their competitors had would still have been too great to overcome, marking a disappointing result as the team celebrate their milestone Grand Prix.
“I just had a lock-up into T10,” Norris explained. “I don’t really know why. When I looked at the data I had fractionally more brake pressure but the line was the same, the bump was the same.
“I was at 99.9% and it’s hard to know that sometimes, and I went to 100% and paid the price. I was pushing a lot and I feel like we got a lot of lap time out of it quite early on in Qualifying.
“There just wasn’t much more to come after that and that’s just frustrating when you see the others doing better and better laps, and the gap getting bigger and you kind of want to go with them.
“We just didn’t have the car all weekend, honestly. We’ve been struggling – that’s been very clear.
“I was two tenths up almost so there was certainly more potential in it, but even if I was two tenths up I only would’ve been ahead of Oscar, so the gap to the others was just too significant. Just not the car this weekend.
“For [the others] to go so much quicker between a couple of runs is just that they go from not pushing much to okay, let’s take a few more risks. I was taking the risks in Q1 already! This is just the position we’re in because we didn’t expect to be maybe quite as quick as we were in Q1 and Q2.
“We expected to be close to knockout so we did a good job, just my last lap let me down and let my Quali down. Otherwise, I think we got a lot out of this weekend. It’s just been a lot tougher than last season – not the confidence, not the grip we want. We need to see in the future what we can improve because we’re a long way off.”
