Piastri concedes – Oscar Piastri admitted McLaren looked destined for seventh place in Monaco qualifying, saying the car lacked grip compared with rivals. Lando Norris’s eighth came after a lock-up into T10 ruined his second run, leaving McLaren facing a frustrating weekend ahea
Oscar Piastri walked away from Monaco Qualifying with a bitter kind of clarity: even if McLaren had made changes, he believes they still would have finished seventh.
In a session that felt increasingly frustrating as it went on. Piastri was forced to settle for P7—more than half a second behind Kimi Antonelli’s pole-position lap. The disappointment didn’t come as a total shock at first. Both Piastri and Lando Norris had already grown used to finding themselves outside the top five during Free Practice around Monaco. Still, there had been hope that the team could find something extra before the all-important qualifying hour.
That hope faded in Q3. While other frontrunners from Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari improved their pace as the session progressed, McLaren struggled to keep up. Piastri summed up the moment when asked whether seventh was the most they could have done.
“I think maybe there was a tiny bit more lap time out there but I think we were going to be seventh no matter what today.
“We struggled with the balance yesterday. Today the car has actually felt a little bit nicer but we’re just lacking grip, it looks like, compared to the others. Not much you can do about it.
“For sure it’s been a bit of a surprise. We didn’t think we would be amazing here, but not as bad as it has been. Definitely some things to look into.”
For McLaren, the 1000th Grand Prix milestone only sharpened the contrast between what they wanted and what they could actually deliver on track. Their qualifying ended with Piastri in seventh and Norris in eighth, placing both cars on the fourth row behind a performance gap they could feel growing.
Norris’s finish was also colored by a small but costly mistake during his second run. After going out as the first of the final 10 cars on track, he was hit by an error that left him starting alongside his team mate on the fourth row.
“I just had a lock-up into T10,” Norris explained. “I don’t really know why. When I looked at the data I had fractionally more brake pressure but the line was the same, the bump was the same.
“I was at 99.9% and it’s hard to know that sometimes, and I went to 100% and paid the price. I was pushing a lot and I feel like we got a lot of lap time out of it quite early on in Qualifying.
“There just wasn’t much more to come after that and that’s just frustrating when you see the others doing better and better laps, and the gap getting bigger and you kind of want to go with them.“
Norris insisted the gap to the rest of the field was too large to solve with one clean lap, even if his mistake hadn’t happened.
“We just didn’t have the car all weekend, honestly. We’ve been struggling – that’s been very clear.
“I was two tenths up almost so there was certainly more potential in it, but even if I was two tenths up I only would’ve been ahead of Oscar, so the gap to the others was just too significant. Just not the car this weekend.
“For [the others] to go so much quicker between a couple of runs is just that they go from not pushing much to okay, let’s take a few more risks. I was taking the risks in Q1 already! This is just the position we’re in because we didn’t expect to be maybe quite as quick as we were in Q1 and Q2.
“We expected to be close to knockout so we did a good job. just my last lap let me down and let my Quali down. Otherwise, I think we got a lot out of this weekend. It’s just been a lot tougher than last season – not the confidence, not the grip we want. We need to see in the future what we can improve because we’re a long way off.”.
The numbers and the quotes fit together in a way that makes the weekend’s frustration easy to see: McLaren couldn’t match the grip others found. Q3 exposed the difference. and even when Norris pushed harder. the car’s limitations kept widening the gap—turning the 1000th Grand Prix build-up into something harder than the team expected.
Oscar Piastri Lando Norris McLaren Monaco Grand Prix qualifying Q3 P7 Piastri quote Norris lock-up T10 Kimi Antonelli pole 1000th Grand Prix