Oscar Piastri admitted McLaren had little room to improve after qualifying seventh for the Monaco Grand Prix, saying the team would likely have landed there “no matter what” they changed. The result left McLaren frustrated at a circuit where track position matters more than almost anywhere else, and where the team had hoped for more after showing flashes of promise in practice.
Piastri said there might have been only “a tiny bit more lap time out there,” but the bigger issue was grip. He described the car as feeling slightly better than on Friday, yet still lacking the traction needed to challenge the fastest teams.
McLaren’s Monaco setback
McLaren arrived at qualifying with some optimism, even though both Piastri and Lando Norris had spent much of practice outside the top five. That hope faded in Q3 as Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari all found more speed, while McLaren could not match the final gains made by their rivals.
Piastri ended the session more than half a second behind Kimi Antonelli’s pole lap. He said the team had struggled with balance the previous day, and even though the car felt better in qualifying, the lack of grip remained the limiting factor.
Piastri: “Not much you can do about it”
The Australian’s post-session assessment was blunt. He said McLaren had expected Monaco to be difficult, but not to the extent it turned out to be, adding that there were “definitely some things to look into.”
His comments underlined a qualifying session in which McLaren could not unlock enough pace from the car, even as the track evolved and other frontrunners improved. For Piastri, the gap appeared structural rather than something a single lap could fix.
Norris backs up the same message
Norris also finished frustrated after a small mistake affected his final push lap, leaving him eighth on the grid. He locked up into Turn 10 and said he had been pushing close to the limit, but the error stopped him from extracting the last improvement available.
Even so, Norris said the result would likely have been similar without that slip. He explained that McLaren had “just didn’t have the car all weekend,” and said the performance gap to the front was too large to cover with finer driving alone.
He added that the team had already found much of its lap time early in qualifying, while rivals kept improving as the session progressed. That trend left McLaren unable to follow the same upward curve when the pressure peaked.
A difficult backdrop for McLaren’s milestone race
The result carried extra weight because McLaren was marking its 1000th Grand Prix. Instead of fighting near the front, the team had both cars starting from the fourth row, with Piastri seventh and Norris eighth after a session that exposed their lack of pace in Monaco conditions.
Norris said the team did not expect the car to be “maybe quite as quick as we were in Q1 and Q2,” but the final outcome still showed how far they were from the leading pace. His view matched Piastri’s sense that the team had squeezed out much of what the package offered, yet still fell short.
Piastri said the weekend had produced useful information, even if the result was disappointing. The broader concern for McLaren was clear: the car needs more grip and confidence if it is to close the gap when conditions demand precision and traction in qualifying.
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