FORMULA 1 MSC CRUISES UNITED STATES GRAND PRIX 2025.....Qualifying...........▄▀▄▀▄▀ SPOILERS ▄▀▄▀▄▀

Max!

Putting McLaren on their toes now.

 

Verstappen absolutely Mighty once again.

BIG pressure on the Mclaren boys.

 

That spin for Charles was nuts.

 

Max coast to coast. He will win Vegas as well.

 

I think Mercedes will be mega there again.

Mexico, Brazil and Qatar however should be good for Max...even though Brazil is more a Mclaren track, Max is special there.

 

ESPN goes from F1 qualifying directly to DODGEBALL.

ESPN 8, the Ocho! Your place for F1 and Dodgeball.

 

Uncle Max! My Lord he shredded them. McC's undies getting sweaty, the big boy's car is working again.

 

For whatever reason, Max dominates Vegas. Maybe its the cold tires.

 

they had axe throwing on before qualy

 

I really hope Charles has a good race tomorrow. He, and the team, really need it.

 

Well, they know they're losing F1 next year, so they don't need to keep that audience happy.

Dodgeball they'll still have.

 

The story of the season is Max...win or lose the WDC...he has become what the 2025 WDC battle is all about.

 

and sign the global marketing jokester - lil' lewee!! think of the F1 audience retained!
they can get lil' lewee to endorse their dodge balls and attire for the cut rate of $20 million wasted instead on the $100's SF burned!!!
[and I bet lewee will throw in axe throwing quite cheaply]

 

if you can dodge an axe, you can dodge a ball!

 

Don’t axe me. I’ll dodge the question.

 

Actual picture of Piastri:

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Leclerc drove well and showed good poise after that spin.

Hamilton drove pretty well also but is 40 years old.

 

It’s strange how much they struggled in the sprint qualifying and race, barely made it out of Q1 and qualified 3rd.

 

well, I hope you're right

 

During some of the commentary on the F1tv app they speculated that Hadjar will replace Tsunoda with Max next year.
Tsunoda would most likely had a better year staying at Racing Bulls. He basically got promoted out of F1.

 

Max is the chaos grenade needed to spice this title up. Win or lose, HE is the one making it interesting. Lando is a boring manchild that can do no wrong in Mclaren's eyes, Piastri, whatever is happening to him...kept to the Papaya rules for too long.

 

Now compare those times to 2024, MV 0.149secs slower, McL 0.471secs slower, SF 0.067secs faster, Merc 0.148secs faster.

Seems like McL lost the most time in this session which kind of switched things around and gave a false grid. Verstapen through the Esses was mind numbingly quick.

 

strange, so poor in sprint qualy but end up 3rd and 5th

must be the weather....

 

Hence the never ending complaining of the useless Yuki about both Lawson and Gasly lol this weekend. I think he has been told he is out if this weekend goes how it appears to be. He is not a good F1 driver. He has been around 2 years too long already.

 

Oscars issues from The Race.com:

When asked by The Race what he was battling in the car this weekend, Piastri said it was “just getting into the rhythm” - a sentiment echoed by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella - on a bumpy track with a mix of big braking zones and high speed corners.

“You need a lot of confidence and there's a lot of corners to make you pay for it if you don't have that feeling,” Piastri said.

“I feel like yesterday [Friday] there were a few relatively clear opportunities to try and find, but today [Saturday] it felt like my laps were maybe not the best laps of my life.”

Piastri felt he was losing “a little bit in a lot of places really” although going into his final run in qualifying the biggest losses were braking for Turn 1, the bumpy but fast Turn 6 right-hander at the end of the opening sector, and the tight Turn 11 hairpin.

There were signs he was not confident on the brakes, struggled to commit over the bumps, and had difficulty getting the front of the car to turn into slower corners like Turn 11 and Turn 15.

This probably played into something both drivers observed in McLaren’s debrief that the laptime here seemed to be derived by taking the car to the limit of locking all four brakes - and a lack of confidence would prohibit this at great cost.

“If you just drive too gently because you can't cope with a wind gust, or you just want to have a prudent approach to driving, you're not going to generate laptime,” Stella said of what his drivers fed back.

“So you sort of have to lean on to the limit, and if you lean on to the limit, you need to have a certain rhythm and a certain confidence.

“If anything is this aspect that is missing on Oscar's side.”

It may be that this demand of the COTA track brought out one of the MCL39’s underlying evils – a tricky front axle that does not always give drivers the best feeling. Piastri has tended to deal with this better than Norris in 2025 but has not been immune to it and said “the kind of behaviour that we've had a couple of times through the season came out to play again today”.