Las Vegas Grand Prix: ‘Lando Norris remains strong title favourite but Max Verstappen properly in the game’

McLaren’s situation is not unusual in F1.

Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari was disqualified from the Chinese Grand Prix at the start of the season and the 2023 US Grand Prix, in which it competed with Mercedes, in the same race as Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.

George Russell’s Mercedes were disqualified from victory in Belgium last season because they were underdogs; partly because the subgrade had eroded more than the team expected.

This is because teams generally want to run their cars as low as possible, because the lower they are, the more aerodynamic downforce they create, thus the faster the lap time.

Participating in any race is a guessing game of sorts, and the more data a team has before deciding on ride height ahead of qualifying, the more accurate the calculation can be and the less risk the team faces.

The less data a team has before a race, the harder it is to decide where to adjust the ride height. And Las Vegas was exactly the kind of weekend where a team could get into trouble.

The second practice session, in which teams gathered most of the race data with heavy fuel loads, was interrupted by two red flags and no one did what is known as a race simulation run.

This means the data on which teams base ride heights is severely limited.

Final practice and qualifying on Friday were wet, so the cars would be slower and therefore have less downforce acting on them and would not erode the ground as if it were dry.

Additionally, the Las Vegas track is hilly and speeds on long straights along the Strip are high, further increasing ground wear.

When you put all of this together, errors can occur.