F1 News
McLaren drivers not doing rain dance, and Verstappen is just Verstappen
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are reluctant to say whether this year's MCL39 can perform well in the rain. The McLaren drivers stress that previous cars often had some peculiar characteristics in the rain, and that they do not know if this has been remedied now. Max Verstappen remains brief on the subject of rain: "Then it's slippery," reads his opinion.
"I don't know. For me, I kind of have to wait and see," Norris responded to the weather forecast. He stressed that he cannot yet form an opinion on the impact the rain will have on the race. "Also, it's a new car, so there's also a lot of unknowns and question marks that we have. Will the car perform? Will it perform at the same level? Are there different issues. You know? So, it's not always as simple as just saying ‘bolt some wets on and and have a crack.’"
According to Norris, there is nothing to do but wait until Sunday. "Definitely, a bit of our pace potentially goes out of the window just because it's a bit harder to extract and show the difference of pace that we've had today. But, we're in the best position to do that, if we can. So I know the chances of rain have been coming down and down. Normally, you've always seen the wet races and inter races, are pretty exciting, especially for you guys. And, yeah. Excited to see what we can do."
More questions than answers
Piastri concurs with his teammate's words. "I think we've all done some wet running on this new layout. But the cars have moved on a lot since then. I can't even remember if the tires are the same anymore. They might be different. So there's there's a lot of unknowns for tomorrow and, obviously being round one, like Lando said, there's still some question marks about whether some of the characteristics we've had in the past are still the same, when it rains."
Max Verstappen, who qualified third for the race, kept it short and sweet as he said he would. "Yeah, [it's] slippery in the wet, so you have to take that into consideration," he said.
This article was written in collaboration with Kimberley Hoefnagel.
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