‘Smelling a lot of wood’: Russell’s radio quip sums up Qatar’s plank paranoia after McLaren’s Vegas DSQs
George Russell didn’t need sensors to tell him the tide had shifted. “I’m smelling a lot of wood,” the Mercedes driver radioed early in FP1 at Lusail — a neat, slightly deadpan nod to the topic no one in the paddock can stop talking about: plank wear.
Seven days on from McLaren’s double disqualification in Las Vegas, every out-lap, every kerb strike, every ride-height tweak suddenly feels loaded. The sport’s oldest materials science lesson — wood meets asphalt, wood loses — has become the subplot to the penultimate round of the season.
And sure enough, the timing screens framed the stakes. McLaren returned to the front immediately on Friday, Oscar Piastri topping the lone practice hour by 0.058s over Lando Norris. Russell was 14th, nine tenths adrift in the Mercedes W16 as teams tried to thread a very fine needle in a compressed Sprint weekend.
Lusail’s the last Sprint of the year, which means just 60 minutes to get your sums right before parc fermé bites for Sprint Qualifying. There is some relief in the regulations — setups can be revisited after Saturday’s Sprint and before Grand Prix qualifying — but it’s still a high-wire act. And after Vegas, everyone’s wearing a safety harness.
McLaren’s story is now well rehearsed: Norris and Piastri finished second and fourth under the lights on the Strip, only to be excluded for excessive plank wear after post-race checks. That promoted Russell and his rookie teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli to second and third respectively — an unexpected silver lining that did nothing to cool the title temperature.
Because make no mistake, the championship picture tightened. Norris arrived in Qatar with a 24-point cushion over Piastri and Max Verstappen, the four-time reigning champion. That margin looked sturdier before the stewards got their rulers out in Nevada.
Which is why Russell’s line carried. If a driver can smell wood, it’s because the car’s skimming — the plank shaving itself thinner with each bottom-out. In a Sprint format, where you’re incentivised to lock a setup early and live with it, the temptation is to run low and harvest performance now, worry about the legality later. After last weekend, that calculus looks braver than it did.
McLaren boss Andrea Stella, for his part, was at pains to contextualise Vegas. He called the cause “extensive porpoising,” describing the disqualifications as a byproduct of an anomaly rather than an aggressive gamble on ride height. The team, Stella insisted, isn’t about to toss away the habits that have produced back-to-back constructors’ titles and placed both drivers at the sharp end with two rounds to go.
“The conditions we experienced last weekend and which led to the onset of porpoising and excess of grounding, compared to what was expected, are very specific to the operating window of the car in Vegas and the circuit characteristics,” he explained, adding that lessons learned would inform the approach from Lusail onward. Translation: the setup model got spooked by a one-off, and there’s no appetite to over-correct.
Still, the psychology has shifted. Engineers will swear blind they don’t chase ghosts, but the memory of a scrutineer’s gauge slipping under a plank lingers. Teams will build in more margin this weekend, if only to avoid adding another variable to a title fight that already feels delicately poised.
Lusail, with its long arcs and punishing high-speed load, isn’t exactly forgiving. Mistime a run over the serrated kerbs and the car can thump the deck. Do it often enough and you earn the scent Russell was talking about — and an uneasy debrief.
None of which helped Mercedes on Friday. Fourteenth is no reason to panic in a one-practice Sprint event, but it does underline how knife-edge the window is. The W16 has looked happier when it can be lowered and pinned to the tarmac; if there’s a weekend where prudence costs lap time, it’s one like this.
For Norris and Russell — two members of the 2019 debut class, both now fixtures at the front of the grid — Qatar looks like a test of nerve as much as speed. Norris has to manage a title campaign in which every point counts and every millimetre matters. Russell, buoyed by that Vegas promotion, has a car that can punish McLaren if they blink.
And yes, everyone will be listening for the tell-tale scrape, peering at the little piles of dust in the garage, and sniffing for the faint, singed smell of a championship being sanded away. It’s not romantic, but in late November, championships are often decided by the dullest parts of a racing car.
The wood doesn’t lie. This weekend, neither can the setups.
