Did McLaren want to take advantage or was his disqualification accidental?
McLaren’s Norris and Piastri were disqualified from the Las Vegas GP due to excessive wear on the cars’ plates.
When the cars McLaren They did not pass the technical inspection in Las Vegas by the FIA delegate, Jo Bauer, not all the members of the other teams were very surprised, since they knew that the strength of the papaya cars is in how they manage to ride so close to the ground to have great performance, but the strange thing was where they failed.
It’s no secret that McLaren has suffered major problems every time it races in vegas. Their results in 2023 and 2024 were very poor, without podiums and even some serious accidents, but it was in the final stint of last year’s race when the “answer” came for the team led by Andrea Stella.
Given that the 2024 race was already lost, McLaren experimented with many things in search of a solution applicable in the future, “that” they found made them Lando Norris will set the fastest lap.
On Wednesday at the press conference, Norris said that, indeed, what was found in the last stint of 2024 would be the key to being competitive in 2025, but he did not want to say what it was about.
“(Last year) we were so bad, I ended up trying everything I could and it was (in the end) better. So I want to reveal as little as possible, but I think we were so bad that you get to a point where you try everything.
“So I was experimenting a lot, trying different ways of driving, different driving styles, different approaches to the car, which is not always easy,” Norris said Wednesday in the conference room.
Perhaps, what they found and that ultimately condemned them to the qualification had to do with the balance of the car. It is no secret that McLaren is the team that has been able to best, thanks to its ingenious suspension, make the car hit more on the front skids, known as skids, and not sink under braking and that the aerodynamic load is predominantly from the middle to the rear of the car.
For this reason, it was believed that if the McLarens were going to fail in the review, it would be in the front part of the plate, not so much in the rear.
The problem was that that approach perhaps had to be pushed to the limit in Las Vegas, after Red Bull had noticeably improved its efficiency and managed to Max Verstappen be a real threat to Norris and Oscar Piastri in the fight for the drivers’ championship.
The wear amounts and locations.#F1 #F1tech #LasVegasGP pic.twitter.com/8oLvWRZMUR
— Craig Scarborough (@ScarbsTech) November 23, 2025
As we know, the disqualification of the McLaren It occurred because the wear of the plate that goes on the floor of the cars was greater than what the regulations establish.
This plate is what ‘tells’ the scrutiny engineers what happened on the track, if wear and tear reveals that they have gone further below the minimum allowable height. The lower it is, the better the performance of a car, so if there is more wear, it will stick more to the ground.
The resin sheet, which looks like wood, must measure 10 millimeters (mm) thick at the four points where the inspection is made, with a tolerance of up to 9 millimeters.
The measurement points are in the front, middle and rear of the car and it does not matter if the plate has more wear between those points, the measurement is made at the points where the skids or metal skids are.
As McLaren has managed to be the most efficient car, in part, because it manages to have a very stable, but low nose of the car and a lower center and rear section, it was surprising that the wear outside the rule in its cars occurred in the middle and rear.
Also, the cars suffered from porpoising during the race and this is generally a product of a very low height at the rear. And of course they knew that they were at risk of some sanction, due to the sparks that the skates or skids produced on the track, no wonder Norris slowed down a lot in the last laps of the race.
In Las Vegas measurements, Norris’ right-side block was 8.88 mm and the rear one at 8.93 mm. In the case of the Piastri, the front left side was measured at 8.96 mm, the front right side at 8.74 mm, and the rear right side at 8.90 mm.
This tells us that there was a different balance between both McLarens, with Piastri’s more forward and Norris’s closer to the ground behind.
The FIA, aware that these height factors are key for teams to find set-up advantages, acquired measurement tools such as the Mitutoyo micrometer, which is capable of measuring accurately down to thousandths of a millimeter. Norris was disqualified for exceeding 12 tenths of a millimeter at one point and 7 at another. A human hair has a thickness of between 0.017 and 0.18 millimeters.
As incredible as it may seem, those tiny proportions can make a big difference, such as, for example, between Norris’s McLaren being sixth in 2024 and in pole position in 2025 and second in the race, even before being disqualified.
The game of heights, suspension and downforce management is not illegal in F1, but it may have been that McLaren tried to improve in Las Vegas, thanks to what they saw in 2024, pressured by the push of Red Bull and Verstappen, but they passed the limit and also could not calculate the risk due to the short practice sessions, where long stints with a lot of fuel load were impossible to carry out.
McLaren didn’t want to be disqualified, nor did they want to cheat, they just tried to stretch the regulations to the maximum and missed it by a hair’s breadth.
