Piastri, meanwhile, cut a somewhat forlorn figure. He had a difficult weekend in the US a week ago and thought he had found the answers. But as he put it: “What’s been a bit surprising here has just been that the gap has been the same pretty much every session.
“I feel like I’ve done some decent laps through the weekend, but everything seems to be about 0.4-0.5secs off.”
Team principal Andrea Stella said Piastri was losing a little bit everywhere, and Piastri said: “I feel like I did a reasonable job and the car felt reasonable as well. So, yeah, the lack of lap time is a bit of a mystery.”
Piastri has been off Norris’ pace whether on short runs or long, low fuel or high, so it is more in hope that he said of the race: “If I can unlock the pace in the car, we can have some fun. We’ve just got to try to unlock it.”
This is now Piastri’s fifth difficult weekend in a row, his form mysteriously evaporating since he won in the Netherlands at the end of August.
He did not talk directly about what this means for the championship, but there was no hiding the meaning behind one of his comments: “There’s a lot of things I could worry about, but ultimately being that far off when you feel like you’ve done a reasonable job is a difficult place to be. And so that’s my biggest concern at the moment.”
Stella said that the conditions in Mexico, like those in Austin, are ones in which Norris thrives and Piastri is less comfortable – low grip, hot tyres.
And he said that “every evidence, every piece of data, every indirect measurement of information we have, tells us that there is no problem with the car”.
He added that it was “good” for McLaren to be able “to confirm that we can have the fastest car”, adding that their “focus is to stop the momentum of Verstappen”.
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