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Lando Norris’s Australian Grand Prix pole was 0.385 seconds faster than the best non-McLaren, rather confirming the opposition’s pre-weekend fears.
An all-papaya front row, with Oscar Piastri right there, less than 0.1s behind and with a fairytale home victory all to play for and no team orders.
But just as McLaren delivered around a track at which it was very easy not to, it initially looked like the key opponents – Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc – had blown feasible challenges.
In fact, the reasons for that – over-temperature rear tyres in the final sector – just underlined the strength of the McLaren.
Around here, the C5 soft tyre is marginal. Just as it was last year and especially at the high track temperatures of 40°C-plus.
The core isn’t really strong enough to support such a soft compound around the high-speed sections of the middle sector, and the excruciating (from a tyre’s perspective) Turn 9-10 sixth-gear switchback that kicks off the final sector.
Getting the preparation right so the fronts are not too cool at the beginning of the lap, the rears are not too hot at the end, is tricky. Every car – even the McLaren – was suffering with this to a greater or lesser extent.
With the McLaren, it was to a lesser extent. With the others, it was to a greater. The McLaren was nibbling at the edges of that problem, but everyone else had fallen deep into it by sector three.
This much is evident when looking at where third-quickest Verstappen and seventh-quickest Leclerc were by the time they arrived at the Turn 11 right-hander.
The Red Bull was 0.266s ahead of Norris by that point. The Ferrari was just 0.074s behind. But with that sequence of three traction-demanding slow corners coming up to finish the lap, at the end of which Verstappen and Leclerc were respectively 0.385s and 0.659s behind Norris’s pole, their challenges had collapsed along with the grip of their rear tyres. They’d been unable to withstand the demands of those fast corners in the way the sweet-riding McLaren had.
Observing cars through Turn 9-10 on track, the McLarens ride like limos and can take visibly more entry speed into Turn 9. The Ferrari and Red Bull (and the Mercedes) are more snappy.
But even on the McLaren, you saw how close to the edge the tyre was with the occasional snappiness and moments – Norris at Turn 4, Piastri at Turn 11, both on their first Q3 laps.
“As soon as you slide these tyres at these temperatures, you lose a lot,” said Piastri. “That’s how fine the line is around here. The car is quick but it can bite at times as you get past the [ideal] tyre temperature.”
Verstappen’s struggle with his tyre grip late in the lap led him to overcommit and lose even more. “The tyres we didn’t get on top of,” he accepted, “but even if we had done we didn’t have the pace for pole.”
“There was maybe another tenth in the car,” said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, “but yes we were taking too much out of the tyres in the first two sectors. The McLarens were brilliant on the tyres.”
The Red Bull was in much more competitive shape than on Friday and with its power unit turned up was no longer trailing the McLaren on the straights. In fact, the DRS advantage Red Bull habitually had in 2023 and early in 2024 seemed to have returned.
Before the DRS zone on the kinking straight before Turn 9, the McLaren and Red Bull were level at 301km/h. By the time they’d travelled through the DRS sector to arrive at the braking zone for Turn 9, the Red Bull had pulled out a 4km/h advantage.
This DRS speed is what helped Verstappen to the fastest middle sector time. He’s every bit as quick as the McLarens through Turn 9-10 too. But that has done for his tyres.
The Ferrari’s straightline speed profile is very similar to McLaren’s but neither Leclerc nor Lewis Hamilton is able to match the McLaren/Red Bull speed through Turn 9-10 – and still it’s enough to trip their rear tyres beyond that tricky temperature threshold. George Russell’s speed profile in the Mercedes through that section is very similar to Leclerc’s.
Rain is heavily forecast for Sunday, so completely changing the key driving factors of competitiveness. In the wet it will be about a driveable balance and getting the front tyre up to the temperature threshold. The McLaren looks very driveable, the Red Bull and Mercedes less so. The Ferrari?
When it’s not being limited by its rear tyre temperatures, it has appeared so far to have inherited the positive traits of its recent predecessors. Then again, the Red Bull is being driven by Max Verstappen…
