Lando Norris may have scored McLaren’s first win for four years in Miami, but his junior team mate’s turn of pace in qualifying has been eye-catching since then.
For the second race weekend running, Oscar Piastri was quick enough for a place on the front row, and potentially more. He was out-done by Max Verstappen’s canny use of Nico Hulkenberg’s slipstream at Imola, then undone by a penalty for impeding, the blame for which rested with his team.
In Monaco he was again quick enough for pole position, but this time had only himself to blame for missing out. He admitted as much as well, saying after the session “a couple of mistakes” kept him from beating pole-winner Charles Leclerc.
The qualifying session data bears out his words. If Piastri had been able to hook his best sector times together he had the potential to nick pole from Leclerc by a few hundredths:
Piastri claimed the space on the grid Fernando Alonso occupied 12 months ago. But Aston Martin’s form has collapsed in recent races and the driver who lined up second last year ended qualifying 18th today. Even with the disqualification of the two Haas drivers he will still start 14 places lower than he did last year.
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Lance Stroll may have got one of the Aston Martins into Q2, but no further, and once qualifying was done the AMR24s were the only cars which had failed to lap the principality any quicker than their predecessors:
At the other end of the scale Haas posted the biggest year-on-year improvement, but as their cars failed a technical inspection that has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However it’s extremely doubtful they found the best part of two seconds from their rear wings opening fractionally wider than allowed.
More likely, they along with all Aston Martin’s rivals managed to improve their performance year-on-year. Even Sauber, though having found only a tenth of a second, will occupy the back row of the grid while the disqualified VF-24s line up in the pit lane:
This was a worrying outcome for the team which introduced a new philosophy of rear wing design this weekend. Valtteri Bottas admitted described being almost a full second slower than the next-quickest car (again, Haas notwithstanding), as “scary”.
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“The time sheet shows how tricky it was,” he told the official F1 channel. “I can’t blame any traffic or any mistakes in qualifying. Things were pretty straightforward.
“We just didn’t have the pace on one lap and it’s a bit scary to see the gap that we would have needed to get into Q2. It’s just out of reach at the moment on this track on one lap.”
“Balance-wise, there’s no big limitation,” he added. “It’s more like we’re just sliding a bit more than the others and for some reason on this kind of track we just can’t find the grip. So lots of things to investigate.”
At the sharp end of the field, lap times have improved by over a second year-on-year. But last year’s pace-setters Red Bull couldn’t find that much. This isn’t the first time this year they haven’t been the quickest team over a single lap – Ferrari out-paced them by a hair in Bahrain – but fourth in the overall rankings is the lowest they have appeared since neither Max Verstappen nor Sergio Perez reached Q2 in Singapore last year.
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2024 Monaco Grand Prix
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