Oscar Piastri called his Las Vegas Grand Prix disqualification “unfortunate” and “disappointing,” after both McLarens were thrown out for excessive skid plank wear in a late-night twist that reshaped the title picture without either driver scoring a point.
Piastri had finished fourth on the road behind race winner Max Verstappen, with Lando Norris second. Post-race checks told a different story. The FIA’s measuring points under each MCL40 revealed wear beyond the permitted limits, and both orange cars were excluded.
The sting for McLaren was sharp, but the fallout wasn’t entirely grim for Piastri. Norris had been set to extend his lead over his teammate by six points; instead, the inter-team gap stays at 24 with 58 still on the table across the final two rounds. The larger threat now? Verstappen. The Red Bull driver’s victory in Vegas pulls him level on points with Piastri in the standings heading into the season’s decisive stretch.
“Disappointing to come away from this weekend with no points after an unfortunate disqualification due to skid wear,” Piastri said. “With how close the grid is, we’re always looking at where we can gain performance, and we didn’t get it right this time. We now need to reset, refocus and push to get the best points possible in the final two rounds, both tracks that we’ve been strong at previously.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella fronted up after the race, confirming both cars suffered “unexpected, high levels of porpoising not seen in the practice sessions,” which ramped up the contact between the floor and the track and accelerated the wear. On Piastri’s car, the plank was found to be 0.04mm and 0.26mm below the 9mm minimum at two of the mandated measurement points.
“We apologise to Lando and Oscar for the loss of points today, at a critical time in their Championship campaigns after two strong performances from them all weekend,” Stella said.
It’s a cruel kind of technicality, but a familiar one in modern F1: run the car too low to harvest performance over kerbs and bumps and you flirt with the plywood’s legal limit. Get unlucky with porpoising mid-race and the floor takes a hammering. The FIA’s floor checks are non-negotiable, and the rulebook is unkind to nuance — as it should be, most rivals would argue.
For Piastri, the arithmetic remains simple: two weekends to overturn Norris by 24 and keep Verstappen in the mirrors. The Australian’s response was measured rather than angry, which tracks with both his temperament and McLaren’s faith in the car’s underlying pace. The delete key may have wiped the Vegas results, but it didn’t erase the speed both drivers showed under the lights.
The calendar’s closing run is now a test of resilience as much as outright performance. Qatar is up next at Lusail, where high-speed corners and a night schedule tend to expose both set-up ambition and execution. McLaren believes it has form at the remaining venues; the job, as Piastri said, is to “reset and refocus.”
The bigger question is whether the Vegas stumble forces McLaren to tweak ride heights and floor stiffness enough to blunt their edge, or if this was a one-off caught out by race-day conditions that didn’t appear in practice. Stella’s read suggests the latter. The title fight will likely tell us which it was by the time the chequered flag falls on the season.
