Las Vegas Strip Circuit, Saturday, 18 November

Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and Team Principal Andrea Stella after qualifying for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

“A frustrating end to qualifying. The pace hadn’t looked too bad in FP3, but we just didn’t put it together in qualifying. The tyres didn’t perform quite as we expected, and the graining was pretty bad so perhaps we should have used a second set. There are still opportunities for tomorrow, the pace of the car is better than where we’ve qualified and plenty of cars are out of position. We’ll work on our plan tonight and try and move up into the points tomorrow.” 

“Qualifying obviously didn’t go to plan. We’ll need to look at the tyre strategy. If other teams used two sets of tyres, I think that explains pretty well why we were at the back. It's a little unexpected after FP3, with how the tyres behaved and how the pace was. It had looked promising. It’s a shame but there’s a lot of long straights here and hopefully we can make our way back forward tomorrow.” 

“So far, this weekend in Vegas has been a bit of a struggle, both in terms of putting the car in a decent operating performance window, and also dealing with the behaviour of the tyres, which are difficult in terms of warm up but at the same time can also get damaged very easily with graining. Despite that, we had enough performance to progress from Q1, but we were not able because the single set of tyres we were going to use were degrading too rapidly and was not enough to beat cars that used two sets.  

“We’ll take that on the chin and refocus on preparing for the race. It may be eventful, tyre behavior will be a major factor, and we’ll do our best to recover and score some points.”