The crash and Verstappen’s subsequent sprint win cut the four-time champion’s deficit to Piastri to 55 points, while he is now 33 behind Norris.<\/p>\n
The Australian led Verstappen by 104 points after the Dutch race on 31 August, so nearly half that advantage has been eroded in three grands prix and a sprint. There are still six races and two further sprints to come.<\/p>\n
In the normal run of things, it seems inevitable that Piastri will lose more ground to Verstappen on Sunday in Texas. Norris has a chance to get ahead, but as he pointed out, the McLaren has not looked like a Verstappen-beating car at any point this weekend.<\/p>\n
“It’s going to be difficult,” Norris said. “We were hoping to learn a lot in the sprint in terms of how the car set-up would be from qualifying to race and hopefully make tweaks but that didn’t go to plan so we are certainly on the back foot. But we won’t make it an excuse for tomorrow.<\/p>\n
“It’s clear we were not going to be as quick as the Red Bull so we have to be happy with second. It’s not being distracted by the mess and nonsense that everyone creates.<\/p>\n
“Saturdays have never been as good this year so I’m hoping we can turn it up tomorrow and be a little bit quicker.<\/p>\n
“I have to be optimistic. Every lap we did today was 0.3-0.5secs off Max so to turn that around will be pretty difficult. I’m sure if Max had done his final lap he would have gone a good step quicker anyway.<\/p>\n
“They have been quick in a lot of races recently. They have been doing a very good job and seemed to catch us up a little bit. It’s not a lot, just enough that they are more consistently ahead. And then you can get more opportunities and of course Max is good at making the most of them.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Stella admitted that McLaren were even more aware of just how potent Verstappen can be for the remainder of the season.<\/p>\n
“I would have expected a smaller gap here, if anything, so we have to look at the facts, we have to look at the numbers,” he said. “Just objectively, not necessarily we maximised what the performance was available today in the car.<\/p>\n
“But we need to be ready as a team and as drivers for Max and Red Bull being competitive and possibly the fastest car at every one of the remaining races.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The crash and Verstappen’s subsequent sprint win cut the four-time champion’s deficit to Piastri to 55 points, while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-510803","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115398334444498078","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}