Piastri explains Madring qualifying mess and ‘pretty crap’ Q3 lap

Oscar Piastri’s qualifying session at the Madring on Saturday never really got going – and by the time it mattered, the McLaren driver was left staring at a seventh-place grid slot and a lap he could only describe as “pretty crap”.

While Lando Norris delivered a stunning late charge to snatch pole for Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix, Piastri endured another scrappy afternoon at Madrid’s new circuit. The Australian had been searching for consistency throughout the weekend, and qualifying offered little relief.

He failed to make the top six in any session or qualifying segment bar FP3, while Norris steadily established himself at the sharp end.

The gap between the two McLarens was already significant in Q1 and Q2, before Piastri’s first Q3 effort briefly suggested he might salvage something: he was only 0.017s slower than Norris.

Then came the final run.

A final shootout to forget

Piastri found just 0.248s on his second Q3 attempt. Norris, meanwhile, somehow extracted another seven tenths despite losing around three tenths in the final corner according to McLaren.

The result was a pole position for Norris and seventh for Piastri – a stark illustration of how differently their afternoons unfolded.

“That was really just one of those sessions where you should hit the reset button and have another go,” he said. “Rather than struggling with anything massively, it was just quite messy.

“The first lap of Q1, I had to abort, and you just get yourself a bit out of sequence and out of the rhythm of it. On a track like this, it's very easy to lose a lot of time, so that was that.

“Also, my last lap in Q3, I'm not surprised it's that far off. It was pretty… crap. That's how it goes sometimes, unfortunately.

“I think it's been a bit of a better weekend, like Monza, in that I at least am happier with what the car's doing. And today was simply just one of those sessions.”

For a driver expecting to fight for race wins and the championship, “one of those sessions” is hardly an ideal description – particularly when the car sitting on the other side of the McLaren bow has just been driven to pole.

Pole was never really on Piastri’s radar

Yet Piastri was not convinced that even a clean qualifying would necessarily have put him in contention for the top spot.

Asked whether he had ever felt the car was capable of pole based on Norris’s performance, the Australian was decidedly cautious.

“Probably not. I think if you did a good job, it felt like it could get higher than where we'd kind of been sitting. But I think to be on pole was clearly an impressive job,” he concluded.

• Read also: Poleman Norris shocked by ‘one of the best laps of my career’

At a circuit where overtaking is expected to be painfully difficult, starting seventh leaves Piastri with considerably more work to do than his championship rival and team-mate.

For once, though, there was no attempt to dress up the afternoon. Piastri had a simple verdict: it was messy, the final lap was “pretty… crap”, and the reset button cannot come soon enough.

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