Oscar Piastri has rued a “disappointing” 2023 Spanish Grand Prix for McLaren, which yielded no points for him nor Lando Norris.
Piastri had qualified 10th in only his third Q3 appearance of the season – later promoted to ninth after a six-place grid penalty for Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, yet the Australian lacked race pace as he fell back to a 13th-placed race finish.
The 2021 F2 champion post-race described his performance as “disappointing” due to a lack of translation of qualifying pace into race pace, which left him enduring a “tough” race.
Piastri though believes that the weekend provided some positives to take into future races, as he commented: “But it’s important we focus on taking the positives from Saturday’s quali result where our one-lap pace looked very strong.
“We now just need to work on the race pace as we head to Canada in two weeks’ time.”
Norris meanwhile finished 17th after his race was ruined in the opening two corners, having accidentally hit Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton as they battled over third place which broke his front wing and necessitated a pit stop for a replacement front wing.
Explaining exactly what unfolded at the start as he doubted McLaren could of finished in the points even without his incident, Norris said: “At the start I didn’t see the Red Bull go off track, misjudged how much the cars in front were going to check up and I just clipped the front wing.
“It was the smallest of touches, but it cost us a lot, although I don’t think we would have finished in the points anyway.”
The Brit echoed Piastri as he too felt that McLaren lacked race pace compared to single lap pace, which left him feeling that the race was always destined to be “difficult” regardless of having started third on the grid.
McLaren Team Principal, Andrea Stella added that their race performance “was a more realistic showing of our current competitiveness.”
Stella however was pleased with how Piastri and Norris extracted performance, as he said: “Despite a difficult position, both Lando and Oscar both kept pushing, their engineering teams put in maximum effort to extract everything from the cars, and the garage crew delivered good pit-stops.”
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