Big change behind Piastri surge as Norris excuses emerge; title leader’s blunder laid bare — Talking Pts

It all feels a bit familiar, doesn’t it.

A title leader seemingly in cruise control turning up to Baku, having a scrappy build-up to qualifying and then binning their car.

It was Oscar Piastri’s story last year.

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This year that unwanted baton was picked up by Andrea Kimi Antoenlli.

The title leader’s session was less than 10 minutes old when he clobbered the apex barrier at Turn 1.

His suspension shattered instantly, but it took considerably longer for him to accept that he was done for the day.

“We better park up, mate. We’re not going to be able to fix that,” he was told by engineer Peter Bonnington.

“Are you sure?” he replied desperately.

“Affirm, stop at a safe place.”

“Let me try, mate. Let me try”

“We can’t fix this, mate.”

He limped to turn 7 and parked in the run-off zone, where he was forced to watch the rest of the session from behind the fence.

For an hour he was alone with his thoughts as he watched his teammate obliterate every other driver and exact maximum punishment on the Italian.

Penny for your thoughts, Kimi.

WHAT’S BEHIND ANTONELLI’S RARE MISTAKE?

It’s hard to know what’s more shocking: that Antonelli made a mistake at the lowest-stakes moment of qualifying or that he made a mistake at all.

You’d have plenty of fingers spare if you were to attempt to count his mistakes for the season to date.

His massive crash in FP3 in Australia wasn’t the scene-setter it might have looked like at the time. Between then and now perhaps his biggest error was mistaking single yellow flags for double yellows in qualifying at the Austrian Grand Prix.

He hasn’t been flawless by any stretch, but he’s been pretty close.

What stands Baku apart, though, is how scrappy a build-up he’s had to the weekend.

He lost all his useful FP1 running to a hydraulics problem and lost half of FP2 to delays changing his engine. FP3 was his only uninterrupted session.

That sort of interrupted running can be extremely costly at street tracks, where confidence is so important — and confidence only comes from seat time.

That’s particularly true given how quickly the circuit was gripping up in qualifying — and predicting the grip level is part of the work of practice, and Antonelli just didn’t have that background knowledge.

But all that said, this was to be his first representative flying lap in Q1. This wasn’t the moment to be taking risks — and this was no small graze of the barriers.

“Very unnecessary mistake,” Antonelli admitted. “Obviously I misjudged with the grip being so different compared to the first lap.

“It’s a good way to come back to earth and to remind myself that I need to be on top of it every time, because otherwise I do these mistakes and a very stupid one.”

Antonelli has developed a reputation for being at the limit at all times. Even with his considerable championship margin, he’s given no indication that he’s going to start counting points.

It’s a strategy that’s worked for him all season, and given the quality of his car and the high probability that he’ll score heavily even from 16th on the grid, there’s a good chance the strategy will still be working for him come Saturday night.

But as Piastri can tell you, to close out a championship is to walk a fine line, even from a position of strength.

How he responds to this moment and recalibrates for the final run of races could yet be very important.

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” he said. “Hopefully we can recover many places. The car is quick. We’re ready to do our best. Hopefully tomorrow is going to be a good race.”

IS THIS THE BREAKTHROUGH RUSSELL HAS FINALLY BEEN LOOKING FOR?

Russell’s last few pole positions have been last-lap wonders that appeared to come from nowhere, the Englishman digging deep to find there was more pace on the table.

This time, though, he clearly knew what he had in hand, and in the words of deputy principal Bradley Lord, he “let it all hang out on that final lap”.

He topped two of the three practice sessions. Then he topped all three qualifying segments.

His final lap comprised three purple sectors. He was faster than every other driver at every other part of the circuit.

I’ve been feeling in a great spot this whole weekend,” he said. “From FP1 I felt confident, I felt hooked up.

“I’m just getting more and more on top of this car and what it requires, and it’s just all feeling more intuitive.”

But even he couldn’t have expected to destroy everyone so comprehensively.

“I felt very confident we were in the running for pole, but when I crossed the line and I saw the gap, I was shocked.”

As much as this result is an outlier — it’s the biggest pole margin of the season and the biggest since Max Verstappen’s pole in the wet in Canada in 2023 — it’s also part of a trend.

Russell has been closer to the pace since the mid-season break. He’s outqualified Antonelli 3-1, and though he hasn’t beaten his teammate in any grand prix in that time, he’s generally been a much better match than he was when he, say, finished seventh in Hungary before the break.

“Me and my team have put so much work in to help me get on top of the limitations, and I think since the summer break it’s been great,” he said. “The performance has been substantially better than the results have shown — it’s three front-row starts in the four races since the break. I’m very pleased with it.”

He wouldn’t admit it, but it would surely feel only sweeter that he’s pulled it all together at a weekend his teammate has fumbled his chance.

But isn’t it too little too late, with 81 points to make up in up to nine grands prix?

“I still keep on believing and keep on fighting until it isn’t possible anymore, but I don’t feel any pressure,” Russell said. “I feel excitement every time I jump in the car now, purely because I feel more confident in myself.

“When that confidence starts to build, it’s just like this upward cycle.

“On the flip side, when you’re on the back foot, you start losing that confidence and then you start pushing the limits more, and that’s when mistakes happen — but he’s been flawless this season. It’s the first mistake he’s made in a qualifying or race this whole year. Let’s see tomorrow.”

Is that the slightest of hints of a hopefully psychological game?

PIASTRI BOUNCES BACK DESPITE NORRIS ASTERISK

It’s not quite the front-row start of 2024, but given where McLaren started the weekend — “Miles off,” Lando Norris said on Thursday — Oscar Piastri will certainly take third place.

Though he was an ice age behind Russell, he was only 0.001s slower than Charles Leclerc, who will start on the front row.

Considering the lack of pace during practice — not to mention the breaking parts that kept both McLaren drivers garaged for parts of Thursday — it’s quite the turnaround.

“We’ve not been particularly quick,” Piastri said. “We’re also running cable ties on our car through Friday, which is never a great sign, so it’s been a little bit of a tricky one for us.

“But it’s not the first time this year, I feel like, that we get to qualifying, we take all the fuel out and the car just comes alive more.

“I’m happy with how we’ve tried to evolve this weekend. It’s certainly not been easy to get the most out of this car around here with how much you have to push and, obviously, the consequences, so to end up P3 is a really good result.”

There’s also of course the comparison to Norris to consider.

The trend at McLaren has been decisively against Piastri and towards his title-winning teammate in recent months. While Norris has felt immediately at home in the upgraded McLaren, which has allowed him to fight for poles and wins again, Piastri’s difficulties adjusting to this year’s rules have instead been exposed.

McLaren boss Andrea Stella has said the team has been attempting to help him adjust, in much the same way it assisted Norris last year, and speaking to reporters on Friday night, the team principal said the signs were good.

“He certainly has made some adaptations from a technical point of view,” he said.

“But above all I think Oscar is also just adapting to his mindset. Oscar, when he’s fast, his data is very clean — it’s like he finds a way of driving the car that is fast but in a way is also nice.

“It looks like you can’t be too nice with the cars, or at least with the McLaren, with the current regulations.

“Hopefully we will keep developing the car and make it just faster and a little bit more driver-friendly.”

Norris, however, insists there’s an asterisk on his qualifying result, which left him starting fifth on the grid after running off the road at turn 3.

“Oscar’s P3. I think P2 was possible,” he told Sky Sports.

“It’s just we’re a long, long way off, especially my car — it’s just a long way off on the straights.

“It’s limiting because there’s a lot of straight here. It’s painful, but there’s nothing I can do.”

A look at the telemetry does show Norris shipping time whenever he’s on full throttle in Q3 — he arrives at the first turn already 0.025s down, for example, and then loses 0.115s between turns 2 and 3, as just a couple of examples.

Stella acknowledged this was likely due to a fuel injection problem, and he suggested it could be fixed for the race.

But just as McLaren will take an unexpectedly good result after practice, Piastri will take his well-executed qualifying performance and try to build on that in the race — and in the coming rounds.

DID VERSTAPPEN MISS A SHOT AT THE FRONT ROW?

Norris wasn’t the only driver who felt he should’ve been on the front row.

Max Verstappen stunned in final practice by pipping Russell to top spot, immediately tearing up the expectations set the day before, when Mercedes looked in total control.

Verstappen’s pace also didn’t evaporate during qualifying, the Dutchman lapping second to Russell in both Q1 and Q2.

But underneath the car, there were problems bubbling that meant he was never going to make himself a genuine pole contender.

“Already from Q1 my engine is just half a second down on the straights compared to my teammate and you can’t understand why,” he said. “So you’re just on the back foot.

“Then in Q3 in my middle lap, exiting the final corner, my battery just didn’t charge to 100 per cent, so I had to abort the lap, which means you lose tyre temp, and around here that’s killing.

“I tried to put as much temp in it, tried to push on the final lap, of course being down on top speed.”

We’ll never know how competitive that final lap could have been, however, because Norris ran off the road at turn 3 and caused a yellow flag.

“The whole weekend we are running really well, the car was feeling well, and then we run into so much trouble in qualifying,” Verstappen lamented.

“Looking at George’s lap I don’t think we would have fought for pole but there was a big gap behind and we should have slotted into that easily.

“But when you have that many issues, you also don’t deserve to be there.”

The string of issues left Verstappen eighth on the grid, his second equal worst qualifying result — and it was just the third time this season he’s been outqualified by teammate Isack Hadjar.

Red Bull Racing is contemplating swapping a previously used engine into Verstappen’s car to solve the problem and restore some pace for the race.

It would be bold to think he could beat Russell, but the Red Bull Racing car looked genuinely competitive in FP3, when it appeared to have a trimmed-out rear wing to boost straight-line speed.

That at least should help Verstappen with overtaking — and he’ll need to do quite a bit of that tonight to recovery from his Friday disaster.