Rumours run wild as depth of McLaren radio ‘deception’ exposed
More details about the depth of McLaren’s potentially deceptive radio messages have emerged with new claims made in public.
Rumours have begun to fly as McLaren’s puzzling radio messages come under further investigation by Formula 1 analysts.
In one of the biggest bombshells of the year, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris were disqualified and stripped of points following a review of the team’s cars after Sunday’s Las Vegas Grand Prix, won by Max Verstappen.
It wasn’t until after midnight local time that the FIA confirmed the constructors’ world champion-outfit had breached technical regulations.
In layman’s terms, the team was busted running its cars too low to the ground in an attempt to gain superior downforce. This resulted in both MCL39 cars bottoming out significantly enough during the race to cause damage beyond the acceptable level to its plank.
Accusations and conspiracy theories spread across cyberspace on Monday with suggestions the team had used “coded messages” when communicating on team radio in an attempt to divert attention away from its plank problems.
The team is yet to make any public comment since it released a statement on Sunday night where team principal Andrea Stella apologised to Piastri and Norris for the technical error.
F1 commentators have now divulged further details about the radio messages sent by Norris, Piastri and the teams’ race engineers.
At no point during the race did the team mention any concerns about degradation to its plank.
Messages shared by Norris and race engineer Will Joseph have set tongues wagging.
Norris and Piastri were repeatedly reminded throughout the race to lift off the accelerator before coasting into Turns 5, 11 and 17 on the Vegas street circuit to avoid potential plank damage.
Championship leader Norris gave a sassy response to Joseph on Lap 42 after he’d been told to “overtake” when trying unsuccessfully to challenge Verstappen for the race lead.
Some commentators have suggested Norris’ cryptic comment on Lap 42 referred to the team’s attempt to do what was necessary to avoid damaging the car’s plank.
“Let’s do whatever we’ve got to do to…. Just tell me what I gotta do,” he said.
Joseph responded: “Well in that case, do more”.
The vague instructions on team radio — mixed with Norris’ sudden lap time drop-off — raised the eyebrows of commentators with Sky Sports pundits assuming the drastic performance decline was a deliberate strategy to conserve fuel.
Norris was on Lap 45 just 5.5 seconds behind the Verstappen, but he crossed the finish line on Lap 50 more than 20 seconds behind the reigning world champ.
One of the last messages given to Norris on team radio was “the fuel looks OK now”.
Leading F1 analysts Peter Windsor, Jon Noble and Scott Mitchell-Malm have all speculated there may have been more to the messages sent.
Noble told The Race F1 podcast McLaren would have first seen evidence of plank concerns during the reconnaissance laps before the race.
“One team boss suggested to me – because all the teams are listening in on everyone else’s radio messages and observing what they’re all doing – their observation was that the first evidence of lift and coast and looking after the plank was as early as the way onto the grid and those early laps,” he said.
“We haven’t got all the answers yet, but that’s as deep as it was.”
Leading F1 journalist Mitchell-Malm noted on the podcast that Piastri was not sent as many messages about the need to lift and coast into those specific corners.
This is despite the Australian being found to have committed the most severe breach with plank wear of 0.126mm compared to his teammate’s 0.12mm.
“So that looks a little bit weird,” Mitchell-Malm said.
“I suspect that’s a function of Norris was doing that management over the last four laps or so whereas Piastri would have just taken more out of it as the race went on.”
The pot of intrigue has been further fuelled by both journalists saying sources have informed them that both McLaren cars were “marginal” for potential plank wear breaches during the Brazilian Grand Prix this month.
“There was an intriguing message from Lando Norris when he was battling George Russell late in that race where he says, ‘Do you want me to keep using DRS, or do you want me to overtake’,” he said.
“So I wonder if that was a clue about, ‘Do you want me to manage the plank and avoid me wearing it away too much or do you want me to go on’. And they gave him the message to push on and get after Max. So there is that.”
He even speculated the team may have potentially elected not to give Piastri the same messages in an attempt to hide the team’s concerns about its cars.
He said there is no suggestion that McLaren had acted “deviously” because that is how all F1 teams operate to avoid giving away information.
“McLaren I don’t think overtly lied or tried to mislead everyone by saying fuel’s really marginal,“ he said on the podcast.
“I think what they might well have been doing was trying to avoid it really being broadcast that there was a marginal plank limitation here, because the technical checks after the race do change.
“It isn’t always the same and it’s different checks on different cars and there’s different amounts of cars that get checked. So being marginal, McLaren might have quite sensibly been trying to avoid an obvious plank problem that might have just encouraged one of the checks to be a plank check.
“Piastri was running outside the top 3, maybe McLaren thought it was less likely that his car would be checked. He was less vulnerable to that sort of thing even if it was marginal. These are all questions that are valid to ask when you have a race that plays out that way.
“The messages that are and aren’t delivered. That’s the thing. Piastri wasn’t getting the same level of urgency that Norris was clearly, otherwise he’d have fallen away by 15-odd seconds as well.”
Leading F1 analyst Windsor, who has been around Formula 1 as an insider for more than 40 years, told the F1 Hour podcast the way the team acted “doesn’t make any sense”.
“The whole thing was very odd,” he said.
“A – the damage was done much earlier. B – why did Will Joseph say we’ve got through the fuel issue now. And C – What was Lando trying to achieve by doing that?
“The whole thing was very odd. There’s a lot of unanswered questions in that.
“If fuel was just a ruse – and McLaren were really just worried about the ride height, well why would Will Joseph say, ‘We’re OK now’. It doesn’t make any sense either.”
He raised another theory that McLaren may have somehow found a way to put a data sensor on its plank.
“Do McLaren have some sort of sensor which actually tells them what the ride height is at the back that tells them what’s going on? If they do. Amazing. Absolutely amazing,” he said.
“I doubt it. But they might have. And maybe that’s what Lando was driving in accordance.”
Norris was the biggest loser of the disqualifications, which have kept Piastri’s faint championship hopes alive.
Verstappen and Piastri are now equal on points, 24 behind the British driver.
A maximum 58 championship points are available in the final two race weekends of the season.
Norris can win the title at the Qatar Grand Prix, beginning Friday, if he earns two more points than both Verstappen and Piastri over the course of the weekend, which includes a sprint race.
Originally published as Rumours run wild as depth of McLaren radio ‘deception’ exposed
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