Adam Cooper F1

With Oscar Piastri having won four of the first six races of the season and established a lead in the World Championship his McLaren Formula 1 team mate Lando Norris has to strike back as soon as he can if he is to retain his title hopes.

We are already 25% into the season, and with a busy European triple header beginning in Imola – a track where the Briton has a solid record of doing well – a lot of points are up for grabs over the next three weekends.

Piastri clearly has momentum on his side, and a good run over this sequences of races will be a further boost.

Norris has made it clear in recent months that he’s not felt fully comfortable with this year’s MCL39, and is not getting the feedback he needs to feel the limit of the grip available.

He’s been working away with the team in an attempt to improve the situation, and Imola will be another test of whether or not he is finding the answers.

“I go to the factory every week, so it’s a constant thing,” he said on Thursday when I asked if he had made progress on that front since Miami. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, there’s new issues, let’s dig into them.’

“We’re always trying to improve things. I’m trying to improve my own things, whether that’s the track or away from it. And the team are doing a great good job to try and help me understand things and figure out things and give me the things that I need to get more out of the car.

“So now there’s been a lot of a lot of work behind the scenes, as there always is. But more than more than ever, I would say, which is a positive thing.”

It’s easy to be sceptical when F1 drivers talk about a car not suiting their style, especially when their team mate seems to be perfectly attuned to the same machine.

However we’re talking about fine margins when these guys are operating at the absolute limit, especially when poles and race wins are at stake.

“Every driver has different ways of driving cars,” said Norris. “In the end of the day, I have no excuses, because I also feel like it’s my job to drive whatever car I get driven.

“So I’m not going to have excuses, but I’m going to have reasons at times, but in the end of the day, I just want to drive the best I can. So I might have days I struggle. I might have days I perform better.

“But no driver is ever satisfied. I’m still trying to improve myself, but we’re still trying to improve the car even though we’re winning races, we’re second in races, we’re dominating races, we still come away at times not happy and expecting more and wanting more.

“So yeah, this is one of the things that’s made my life trickier this year than it was last season, and it’s not allowing me to get my full potential. But I need more from the car, and I also know that I need to – at times – do a better job too.”

The challenge Norris faces is obviously firstly to fully understand what’s not working for him, and secondly to find solutions. It’s not easy to turn things around.

“I don’t always have to have reasons straight away,” he noted. “Sometimes it takes time, just like some of the difficulties I’ve had with the car this year, I know that some of the things that we’re trying to work on to improve my feeling takes time, and I have to be patient with certain things, and I have to be patient with my own improvements at times.

“You always want to go into the next weekend and things to be perfect. But it’s not always the case. You look at any other sports, no team just goes from one day to the next day and becomes a loser and then a winner.

“Sometimes it takes two or three races, whether it’s a football team or tennis player, a golfer, you never see them going from a shocking weekend to just dominating all of a sudden, especially when you’re at the top.

“Sometimes it takes weeks, months, different amount of races. So I don’t always need to have the reasons, but it’s always better to find them out so you can work on them.”

On the plus side Norris knows he has a car that can win races when everything falls into place.

Why the MCL39 is so good at managing its tyres is the question that is vexing the opposition.

“A lot of people talk about the tyres a lot, all the time, but it’s not just the tyres,” he said. “There’s a lot of different things that we do well, including just the balance and how the car performs. So all we have to do is keep focusing on our own job.

“We’ve not really had any upgrades or many big improvements when other teams have. So we’re taking our time with stuff, and making sure we do it our way. And I’m happy with that.”

Lewis Hamilton’s radio frustration with his Ferrari Formula 1 team inevitably became the big story of the Miami GP.

Afterwards the former World Champion was keen to play down his comments – while stressing that they showed that he still has that desire to win.

The situation arose because he started on the hard tyres and switched to mediums. Finding that the car came alive and suited him better he came up behind Charles Leclerc, who had done the opposite strategy.

The heated discussion followed as Lewis felt that he had the pace with which to chase the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli up ahead, and he thus wanted to get cleanly past Leclerc and make best use of his tyres.

His frustration came as it took a couple of laps for the decision to be made to let him through.

When he failed to make much progress – perhaps because his tyres had lost some of the initial advantage that he might have had – the positions were reversed.

In these cases that tension is usually still in the air after the flag when drivers meet the media.

Crucially in this instance Lewis had met with team boss Fred Vasseur before the came to face the media, and they’d had a chance to put their points across.

Subsequently rather than clam up Lewis was keen to explain his point of view. He was almost sheepish in the way he downplayed his comments, perhaps aware that the stable door was being closed too late to stop the storm that they had already created.

“I generally enjoyed the race,” he said when I asked him about his afternoon. “I think this weekend, whilst we were not as quick as we want to be, I think I feel like I had a better weekend in general.

“The result might not show necessarily today, but I was 12th, so very hard to overtake here. Cars were obviously so close.

“I got onto the medium tyre, and I felt the car really come alive. And I felt super optimistic in that moment, and I all I could see is the [Mercedes] up ahead, and I was thinking, maybe we can get up to sixth or something.

“But we lost a lot of time in those laps, and I was clearly quicker in that moment. And I didn’t think the decision came quick enough, and then for sure in that time, you’re like, ‘Come on!’

“That’s really kind of it. I have no problems with the team, or with Charles. I think we could do it better, but the car is where we really need to improve. We’re ultimately battling for seventh and eighth.”

The frustration came really because Hamilton initially felt so good on the medium tyre, and couldn’t use the pace he felt he had when behind Leclerc.

“I lost quite a bit of the tyres in that, which is okay,” he said. “We’re battling for position at the end of the day, but it would have been great if we could have maybe done what Valtteri and I did back in the past, years ago, or just move, see if I can catch him.

“If I can’t, then move back. But ultimately, it didn’t work out. Whether or not we could have overtaken a Mercedes, and at the end of the day, we were not quick enough.

“That’s probably where the frustration came from. We will keep our heads up. We’ll keep pushing.”

As noted Hamilton met Vasseur before he talked to the media, and both men had a chance to explain their positions.

It’s clear that, while understanding the frustration of any racing driver in such a situation, the team boss wasn’t happy with the tone of some of the radio traffic. In effect it was aimed at him, given that ultimately it was his call to make.

“Fred came to my room,” said Hamilton. “I just put my hand on his shoulder, like, dude, calm down! It’s not good to be so sensitive. I could have said way worse things on the radio. You hear some of the things other people have said in the past!

“Some of it was sarcasm. You’ve got to understand, we’re under a huge amount of pressure within the cars. You’re never going to get the most peaceful messages come through in the heat of battle.”

He added: “It was ‘Make a decision. Let’s go.’ It was kind of like, ‘We’ll get back to you.’ I definitely said that to Shov or Bono once before.”

Hamilton also made the point that at least he didn’t resort to swearing.

“It wasn’t even anger,” he said. “It wasn’t even effing and blinding or anything like that. It was just like, come on make a decision, you’re sitting there on the chair, you’ve the stuff in front of you, make the decision quick.

“That’s how I was, whereas me, I’m like, we’re in a panic. We’re trying to keep the car on the track. The computer thinks fast.

“It was all PG at least, right? I don’t know what you’re going to write, whether I was disrespectful or whatever. I honestly, I don’t feel I was. I was just like, come on guys. I want to win.”

And that’s the bottom line – Hamilton is the ultimate racer, and he simply wanted to get on with it.

“Still got that fire in my belly,” he said. “I could feel a little bit of it like really coming up there. And I’m not going to apologise for being a fighter.

“I’m not going to apologise for still wanting it. I know everyone in the team does too, and I truly believe that when we fix some of the problems that we have with the car, we’ll be back in the fight with the Mercedes, with the Bulls, and it just can’t come quick enough.

“We’ll try something different in the next race. We’ll keep working on our processes. Look forward to the time where maybe I can fight for a podium. That’ll be nice.”

The fact that Hamilton felt good on the medium tyre in the latter part of the race was another sign of light at the end of the tunnel, following a similarly strong middle stint in the Bahrain GP.

The trick is to find the sweet spot, and get that feeling on a regular basis.

“I had a good day in general. Eighth doesn’t really look like that. I feel optimistic for the future. I think this car really does have performance.

“But something is holding us back at the moment, and we’ve lost performance since China. And it’s there. It’s just we can’t use it until we get a fix for that. This is where we are.

“In the meantime, we can work on all the other stuff, the processes. But as I said, I came from the sim last week, I felt like I generally had a better weekend to get the third yesterday was positive, had a better qualifying, I only missed out by half a tenth.

“Still for us, we’re battling with the Williams here, so we’re clearly not as quick as we ought to be. Williams did a great job this weekend.”

The Alpine Formula 1 team has taken some of the heat out of the driver situation by framing the switch from Jack Doohan to Franco Colapinto as a “rotation,” with the Argentine driver guaranteed five races before a review prior to the British GP.

The team stresses that Doohan is the number one reserve – leaving Paul Aron in the lurch – and that he’s still part of the team.

How that unfolds remains to be seen, and one assumes Colapinto will have to really screw up to not still be in the car at Silverstone, especially given the commercial package that he brings.

He has the advantage of knowing Imola, Barcelona, Monaco and Austria from F2, although Montreal will be new to him. He’s been kept sharp with testing in a 2023 car and sim running, and also has the experience of his nine Williams races last year, whereas Doohan came into the season with just one F1 start behind him, and had more unfamiliar tracks to learn.

It will be fascinating to see if Colapinto can rebuild the momentum he had late last year, before a messy Las Vegas weekend derailed him somewhat.

He certainly deserves another chance to prove that he really has what it takes to be a future superstar, although it’s a pity that it’s happened at the expense of Doohan.

Rarely has a new driver been so undermined elements within his own team, with the signing of Colapinto and the arrival of his sponsorship clearly pointing to a race seat sooner rather than later.

Doohan was under intense pressure even before the first test of this season, and it was inevitable that mistakes would follow as he tried to impress.

The contrast with the red carpet rolled out for Kimi Antonelli, who has felt nothing but support and love from all sides at Mercedes and has been given time to get onto the pace of his team mate, could not be greater. And while Liam Lawson faced a difficult time at RBR he had the soft landing of a return to VCARB.

Pretty much everything that could go wrong for Doohan did go wrong, with him losing qualifying runs to yellow flags or (as in the Miami sprint) to a chequered flag.

There were flashes of inspiration, such as P5 in Q1 in Bahrain, and beating Pierre Gasly in main qualifying last weekend. Alas the Miami GP first corner tangle with Lawson – who was responsible for a previous clash between the pair in China – came at the worst possible time.

In justifying the change Alpine quotes Flavio Briatore as saying: “Having reviewed the opening races of the season, we have come to the decision to put Franco in the car alongside Pierre for the next five races. With the field being so closely matched this year, and with a competitive car, which the team has drastically improved in the past 12 months, we are in a position where we see the need to rotate our line-up.

”We also know the 2026 season will be an important one for the team and having a complete and fair assessment of the drivers this season is the right thing to do in order to maximise our ambitions next year.

”We continue to support Jack at the team, as he has acted in a very professional manner in his role as a race driver so far this season. The next five races will give us an opportunity to try something different and after this time period we will assess our options.”

Doohan says: “I am very proud to have achieved my lifelong ambition to be a professional F1 driver and I will forever be grateful to the team for helping me achieve this dream.

“Obviously, this latest chapter is a tough one for me to take because, as a professional driver, naturally I want to be racing. That said, I appreciate the team’s trust and commitment.

“We have long-term goals as a team to achieve and I will continue to give my maximum efforts in any way I can to help achieve those. For now, I will keep my head down, keep working hard, watch with interest the next five races and keep chasing my own personal goals.”

Oscar Piastri has had a brilliant run in recent weeks, but the McLaren F1 ace’s luck ran out in the sprint on Saturday in Miami when the safety car timing tipped the balance in favour of Lando Norris.

A couple of hours later he ended the main qualifying fourth, having lost out to Max Verstappen, Norris and Kimi Antonelli.

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Afterwards he was brutally honest about the mistakes he’d made in Q3 in the sort of manner that we’ve come accustomed to with his team mate.

“This afternoon was nothing to do with luck,” he said when I asked about the outcome.

“It was just not the level of execution I needed to have in Q3. It’s never a great qualifying session when your best lap is the first lap of Q2. There was quite a bit left on the table, a few mistakes on both laps in Q3 which is a shame.

“Both laps of Q3 I struggled at Turn 1. I think I lost pretty much two-tenths in Turn 1, and then my first lap of Q3 I kind of gained it back a bit through the rest of sector one, and then fell away in the middle.

“The last one I eventually recovered some of it at the end, but it wasn’t enough. So this was nothing to do with preparation. It was just execution of the driving, unfortunately.”

Piastri had no doubts about his potential speed had he got it just right.

“I’m not concerned about the pace I had today,” he said. “It was just that, unfortunately, I didn’t use it when I really needed it. And, yeah, I think after the lap in Q2 I just never quite got back into the same rhythm.

“And that was kind of the difference at the end. So some things to look at, for sure, but I know exactly where it went wrong, which is frustrating. But better than asking some questions.”

At the start of the season many people thought McLaren would be dominant and run away with everything, but it’s not been quite like that, especially over one lap.

Verstappen has had a great run of poles for Red Bull, while Ferrari and Mercedes have taken the top spots in the two sprint events.

In other words McLaren has to enjoy a perfect qualifying session in order to be on top.

“There’s definitely still some things with our car that we want to try and address, and driving it right on the limit is one of them,” said Piastri.

“I think this weekend it has had enough pace to be on pole. It’s just that I’ve not done as good a job as I should have, unfortunately.

“I think it’s always been tight. The gap has always been closed, and potentially our advantage has been a little bit more on Sundays. But I think our picture of where we stand has always been that if we make mistakes, where we’re going to be beaten. And that’s been true through the year.”

It remains to be seen if things will turn around in the Miami race.

“It’s hard to say, honestly, the tires have behaved a bit better than most people have expected, I would say, compared to last year. If it’s hot, that might help us out a little bit, but qualifying is still going to make a massive difference for tomorrow.

“So it’s not going to be easy to make progress, but I’m confident in the car that we’ve got.”

Saturday in Miami turned into a nightmare for Charles Leclerc, with a reconnaissance lap crash robbing him of the chance to start the sprint event.

Even worse for the Ferrari driver after the car was repaired he had a relatively straightforward qualifying session with clean laps that resulted in a humble P8, benchmarking the pace of the SF-25 this weekend.

Meanwhile team mate Lewis Hamilton just missed the Q3 cut, and will start in 12^th.

The double frustration for Ferrari was that Leclerc’s crash was an own goal as the team sent both drivers out for their exploratory laps in soaking conditions on intermediate tyres, when others went for full wets.

Hamilton admitted that he’d also had a moment and was lucky to escape his team mate’s fate.

“I’ve watched it quite a few times,” said Leclerc when I asked him about the crash. “Honestly, I can drive around 100 times, and there’s not as much you can do as a driver.

“I think the mistake was in the first place to be out on inter tyres, with those track conditions and this we need to understand what we’ve done wrong as a team.

“I won’t go too deep into that, but obviously, I think this was the main mistake that then cost us a lot. But yeah, obviously that made the whole day a lot more difficult for the mechanics, for me as well not doing as many laps as others, but I don’t feel like I’ve paid the price of it today.”

Leclerc agreed that P8 was as much as the team could expect given the overall lack of pace.

“We’re just not fast enough,” he said. “We’ve got to analyse. There was something strange on our side. I had to change massively, the car, the tools and everything, in order to have kind of a balance I liked. It was very different. So we’ve got to look into it to understand what happened there.”

Asked if the car wasn’t 100 percent after the rebuild he said: “I don’t want to say that for now. The mechanics have done an incredible job putting everything on and to be honest, we’ve changed few things on the cars as well in terms of setup.

“It’s unclear to me whether the set-up changes had had a much bigger impact than what I thought, or whether there’s something off. But this will look tonight.”

Ferrari’s lack of performance is a real concern for a team that can’t afford to be starting in P8, with much now riding on updates expected for Imola and beyond.

“It is frustrating. But to be honest this weekend I feel like – and that’s probably even more frustrating – is that I feel we are maximising the potential of the car. It’s just that the potential of the car is just not there. When I finish a lap, again today in qualifying, I feel very satisfied with my lap, but it’s only bringing us whatever it is, P8 or something.

“So yeah, we’ve got to look at it. I think a track like this also highlights our weaknesses. There’s a lot of low-speed content. Williams are in front of us, and I consider my lap a good one. It’s pretty easy to understand where we are lacking.

“We are just not fast, and whatever we do with the car, we can run it in different ways, but we just don’t have the downforce that the others have at the moment, especially at low speeds.”