McLaren insists the dramatic double disqualification that rocked their 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix celebrations was caused by an unpredictable bout of porpoising – and they’re adamant it won’t happen again as the team rolls into Qatar for the penultimate round of the season.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri had crossed the line in second and fourth under the bright Nevada lights, only to lose their hard-earned points hours later when stewards ruled both MCL39s showed excessive skid-block wear. A hefty penalty on paper — and in it went, erasing one of the team’s strongest Sunday results of 2025.
Despite the setback, Norris still sits atop the World Championship with two races to go, although the margins are tightening fast. Max Verstappen’s run to victory in Vegas means the Red Bull star is now only 24 points behind, level with Piastri in the standings and very much within striking distance.
McLaren: ‘Anomalous porpoising, not reckless set-up chasing’
In a detailed post-race Q&A released on Thursday, team principal Andrea Stella outlined what he described as an “unexpected occurrence of extensive porpoising” — complete with “large vertical oscillations” battering the car over 50 long laps.
The issue, Stella confirmed, was “exacerbated by the conditions in which the car operated during the race,” and curiously, the team’s attempts to help the situation by asking drivers to lift and coast down long straights actually made matters worse in some portions of the Las Vegas street track.
“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.
“We have a well-established and consolidated way of setting up the car and we are confident that this will lead us to an optimal plan for the coming races, starting from the Lusail International Circuit.
“Nevertheless, we learn from every lesson and the one in Las Vegas has been able to provide some useful information about the operating window of the car and the porpoising regime.”
With teams always tempted to run their machinery as close to the asphalt as possible for aerodynamic gain, the FIA’s mandatory 9mm minimum plank wear exists as the safety gatekeeper. Many assumed McLaren had pushed that limit just a fraction too far, but the team rejects the idea of over-aggression.
“What happened in Vegas was due to an anomaly in the behaviour of the car, rather than it being the outcome of an excessive or unreasonable chase of performance,” Stella said.
Drivers: ‘It wasn’t about running too low’
Speaking in Lusail on Thursday ahead of a Sprint weekend that could decide the championship, both Norris and Piastri echoed the team boss: the situation, they say, was far more complex than simply bolting the car too close to the ground.
Norris put it bluntly: “It wasn’t because we were just running low. Sometimes it can be the opposite,” adding with a grin: “In some ways, you can almost say we didn’t take enough risk.
“It’s not as simple as just looking at it and saying, ‘ah, they did that and that’s why they are quick.’ In fact, we were slower because of the issues that we had, not quicker.
“I’m almost more excited to just get it better for this weekend because we’ll have more performance.”
With a maiden Formula 1 crown within reach, Norris is keeping perspective — and hunger.
“At every team, when you’re in Formula 1 fighting for race wins, you always have to push things to the limit,” he continued.
“That’s not meaning that’s exactly what we did in Las Vegas, because it’s a lot more complicated. We still want to win these last few races, we still need to push everything to the limit as you always do, because Red Bull are just as quick. If we don’t put things in the right condition, like in Brazil, they’ll be quicker than us and they’ll win.”
Piastri offered further insight into just how Vegas caught McLaren out. With FP2 heavily disrupted by red flags, the team lacked clean data.
“You try to get the most out of the ride height everywhere you can,” the Australian explained.
“It’s pretty much the main way you gain performance in these cars – getting them in the right window, Vegas especially.
“A lot of long straights and slow corners means you’ve got quite a big difference in ride heights between the different speed ranges, so it is important in Vegas. But we had no concerns of anything.
“We obviously didn’t get that much practice in. It wasn’t the easiest to get a read, but obviously, that’s the same for everybody. What we didn’t expect was how much porpoising we had in the race.
“It wasn’t like we took extra risk, we actually played it safe given we hadn’t had that much practice but there was just things that happened that we didn’t expect.”
Norris: ‘It sucks, but that’s life’
The McLaren pit wall had barely finished celebrating Norris’s P2 and Piastri’s top-four result before the notification came through. For a brief moment, Norris held a 30-point cushion over Piastri and 42 over Verstappen — and then it was gone.
Yet the Briton is remarkably serene about the whole affair.
“I was quite ok, to be honest,” Norris said.
“It doesn’t help [to be angry]. From what I had to do in the race there was already some expectation that it might happen, so it wasn’t a shock, it wasn’t a surprise.
“We knew we were having a lot more issues than we ever expected during the race and that led already to the expectation that some things might not be as we expect.
“Maybe it would have hurt more if it won the race, but we didn’t, so it doesn’t change anything, there’s no point being too sad about it.
“Of course, everyone in the team was a bit gutted about the result because there’s a lot of effort that goes into it. It’s the same for everyone but 0.1mm or whatever is like a piece of paper. So it was frustrating, but I was quite ok.
“Just excited to go again this weekend, it doesn’t change anything. I want to try and win in Qatar, I want to try and win in Abu Dhabi.
“It sucks, but that’s life sometimes.”
And so the fight moves to Lusail, where McLaren hopes the only oscillations they’ll feel this weekend are those in the championship standings — preferably upward. The loss in Vegas hurt, yes. But for a team still very much in the title fight, the mood is less heartbreak and more reset-and-reload. The desert awaits.
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