Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, 2025

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes he understands why Oscar Piastri was unusually far behind his team mate in qualifying for the Mexican Grand Prix.

The championship leader was almost six tenths of a second slower than Lando Norris in the other McLaren today and will start six places behind him. Stella admitted the result was “definitely unusual”.

“Our two drivers have always been separated by a few milliseconds in qualifying and by a few centimetres in the race,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “So it’s unusual to see this distance on the grid and this distance in terms of lap time.”

Norris also out-qualified Piastri in both sessions at the Circuit of the Americas last weekend, though not by as wide a margin. Stella believes there are similarities in the characteristics of the two circuits which explain the gap.

“I think in Austin and here, the conditions are such that the car slides a lot,” he explained. “And I think this requires a particular familiarity with the car, with how you exploit the car, which possibly is something on which Oscar needs to still work a little bit.

“With these small [lap time] gaps, it’s easy to pay a price in terms of positions – even if the gap in this case to Lando is big, the gaps to some other competitors is not that big. It’s something that we do have to review with Oscar.”

He said the trend also explains why Norris tends to have a slight advantage in race pace over his team mate. “The race, when the tyres are old and the car slides a lot, is Lando’s regime.

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“Here, the qualifying sessions are almost kind of similar to that regime. While Oscar is more a driver of having grip and pushing the car in a certain way.

“We shouldn’t forget that Oscar is [in] year three in Formula 1, and he’s also one that learns at the speed of light. So if we do good work on processing what the learning is, he will do it.”

Stella said Norris’s qualifying lap was particularly impressive and took him by surprise. “It was obviously a special lap,” he said, “he commented on the in-lap, ‘I’m not even sure how I did it’.

“But in reality, Lando has shown strong performance throughout the weekend. I think in practice he has put together a very strong long run pace and some fast laps and through qualifying, I think he’s been pretty much the fastest in every session.

“So it’s good that he could capitalise on this performance from himself and also important that we as a team confirmed that we can have the best car after a few races in which we hesitated and possibly we didn’t maximise the performance.

“So it’s important for Lando, important for McLaren and a few things to review obviously with Oscar because we want to recover positions tomorrow.”

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2025 Mexican Grand Prix

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