Source: REUTERS/Issei Kato
[Saba Sports News] In the F1 Japanese Grand Prix that ended last week, Oscar Piastri admitted that he was only a 100-meter straight away from overtaking Lando Norris. In the last ten laps of the race, Piastri asked the team to coordinate a position swap with his teammate three times over the radio, but McLaren’s strategy team ultimately chose to maintain the status quo, allowing Norris to secure second place with a 0.7-second advantage. Technical data shows that Piastri was 0.15 seconds per lap faster than his teammate in the second sector but lost 0.3 seconds on the 1.5-kilometer main straight due to the wake effect. After the race, Piastri’s statement was even more intriguing, as he said, “If he were in Norris’s position, he had the speed to catch up with Max Verstappen.” This hypothetical statement suggests that the ambitions of the 23-year-old are expanding. In response, McLaren launched a crisis PR, with team leader Andrea Stella revealing in an interview that the team had calculated in real-time that even if Piastri had overtaken, he would need at least five laps to get within 1 second of Verstappen. More critically, Norris’s tires showed signs of graininess in the final stages of the race, and a forced overtake could have led to both cars losing control.