Coming into the weekend of the Chinese Grand Prix, McLaren was the favourite to be the fastest on the grid. The results of the first free practice session favoured this prediction. However, as Sprint Qualifying arrived at Shanghai, McLaren surprisingly was not able to fight strongly at the front.
During the Sprint Race, Oscar Piastri started 3rd while the Championship leader, Lando Norris started all the way down from 6th. Lewis Hamilton who started from pole position went on to win the race with Oscar, 6 seconds behind him. This is quite a large gap for a Sprint Race. So what went wrong for McLaren?
McLaren team principal details problems in Shanghai Sprint Race
While Oscar was able to finish the sprint race in 2nd place, Lando Norris fell further back from where he started and ended up finishing only 8th. This was a shocking disappointing result for the Championship leader.
Talking to the media after the race, McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, gave an explanation as to why the MCL39 did not perform as expected during the Sprint Race.
“Oscar managed to limit the damage in a way, I think his pace was strong, but in following and then fighting with Verstappen, we might have used the tyres a bit more than Lewis. Having said that, it’s all to be proven that we could be as fast as Lewis, so it will be interesting for tomorrow.”
Off the start, Oscar was still behind Max Verstappen in 2nd. Towards the final few laps of the race, Piastri made a move on Verstappen and was just 3 seconds behind Lewis Hamilton. However, he had used up too much of the tyres to overtake Max and did not have much left to catch up to Lewis.
Stella went on to explain why things went wrong for Lando:
“On Lando’s side, we struggled definitely with managing from graining, so we didn’t have much pace in hand in fairness, and we have some work to do to understand what to do for the race tomorrow.”
One of the key talking points after the Sprint Race is tyre wear. During the race, we saw a lot of drivers in the top half of the grid struggle with maintaining their tyres. This prevented them from getting too close to the car ahead while taking on the dirty air. While there were drivers who did overtake, like Piastri, they sacrificed a lot of the tyres and could not maintain their pace.
Why is tyre degradation high at the Chinese Grand Prix?
Unlike the last race in Melbourne, the weather temperatures in Shanghai are extremely hot for the sessions. This means a hotter track and therefore, overheating tyres. This creates new problems for F1 cars.
When the Pirelli tyres get overheated, they start to grain and blister with every lap. For Lando Norris, tyre graining is his worst nightmare. This reduces the performance and life of the tyre. On top of this issue, the F1 cars face a lot of dirty air when following closely to the car ahead. This makes the tyres even more hotter making it very difficult to overtake despite the long straight at the circuit.
Heading into the qualifying session for the Chinese Grand Prix, all the top teams will be looking to qualify into the front row to have the maximum advantage. Being at the front of the grid gives the driver clean air to drive in and track position. As Lewis Hamilton did, being at the front allows you to control the race by managing your tyres.
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