I watch night races the next morning on F1 TV. Total media blackout from the time I wake up until the end of the podium ceremonies. So, like any other Sunday, I made coffee and sat down doe-eyed and hopeful for Lando Norris to convert pole to a first Vegas win. That hope was dashed after he pulled an overly aggressive defensive dive bomb on Max and couldn’t recover from the oversteer. We all know if Max Verstappen can get out in front, it’s hard to take that away from him. OK, still fine. All we needed was for Lando to finish ahead of Oscar Piastri. Lando was up some 24 points over Oscar going into Vegas and 49 over Max, so the championship was his for the losing. I should never have even thought that. 

Aside from the opening melee, which sent both Bortoletto and Stroll back to the paddock, it was a pretty steady and uneventful race. The best thing that happened was Kimi Antonelli flying from 17th to 4th and squeezing some kind of magic out of 48 lap-old tires. We needed him to do that. L4 Nation needed Kimi to hold back Charles LeClerc and Oscar to keep the points spread as wide as possible between Norris and Piastri. Kimi’s drive was fantastic by any measure, and certainly a highlight of his rookie career. 

With around 4 laps to go, Lando got a call to lift and coast wherever he could. That’s a technique that involves lifting off the throttle at the end of straights to reduce the aerodynamic load and downforce, which in turn lifts the car. It’s normally done to save fuel, cool down some part of the car or manage tires, but that didn’t make sense on a cold track with long straights. Something was wrong.

Lando’s 20-second lead over George Russell was rapidly diminishing. He wasn’t keeping pace. Kimi received a 5-second penalty for a rolling start, so he would be dropped to 5th, making Oscar effectively 4th. If Lando dropped to 3rd, that would close the points gap too much for a clear championship win for Lando. With 1 lap to go, there was only 3 seconds between Lando and George. 2 by the time they hit the back straight of the last lap. Biting my nails at this point.

Lando crossed 2nd, behind Max. Oscar would be 4th with Kimi’s penalty. Still OK. Not great, but OK. Lando, however, looked concerned from the moment he got out of the car. He’s someone who wears his emotions on his sleeve, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that he was doing the math and not happy with the outcome. Nonetheless, this is a guy who smiles ALL THE TIME, so his expression of consternation was really odd. There were no fist bumps or high fives at parc ferme. The winner’s ride to the interview was awkward. When speaking with James HInchcliff, he admitted he’d “fucked up” in turn 1 (a comment he would later be fined $50,000 for making on live TV) and carried his disappointment to the podium. I just thought he was being too hard on himself, 2nd was still a great result. 

At that point, I turned on my phone, booted up my ipad and set out to find out what was happening in the world. First headline to catch my eye: “Verstappen Wins Formula 1 race in Las Vegas as Norris and Piastri are Disqualified”. What the actual F?! Both McLarens had been DQd for exceeding skid wear maximums. OH MY GAWD. He must have known.

For those of you who don’t speak F1, there used to be a wooden plank on the bottom of an F1 car that was called the skid plank. It prevented the bottom of the car from being scraped on the track when the car encountered bumps or uneven surfaces. Now it’s a carbon fiber plate, but the function is the same. When you see sparks flying out of the back of an F1 car, that’s actually the skid plate making contact. That usually means the car was set up too low for the track or the suspension isn’t performing well and the car is bouncing up and down. 

The FIA checks the wear of each car’s “plank” at the end of the race. They measure four holes on the plank that must be 10 millimeters deep (plus or minus 0.2) at the start of the race and no less than 9 deep at the end of the race. On Norris’ car, the wear was 0.12 millimeters over the limit, and on Piastri’s, it was 0.26. To put that in context, the width of the average human hair is about 0.17 millimeters, meaning Norris could quite literally miss out on the title by less than a hair. The 30 point lead that he held over Oscar and the 42 over Max was diminished to only 24 over both of them – Max had now tied Oscar. What was a championship locked is now a slim margin.

This is unacceptable from the Championship-winning team. There are over 1200 people involved in the design and set up of that car. Someone should have anticipated the possibility. Team Principal, Andrea Stella, said as much in a post-race interview ‘It’s our responsibility. If we know our car know our car, we should know that something happens. It’s not an excuse, but it was  little bit of a surprise to us.” He commented that the setup was fine in the wet practice and there really hadn’t been a dry run in the car. He said their drivers were caught out by unexpected “extensive porpoising”  (the bouncing up and down) but he insisted they did not take “excessive risks with ride height”. Stella said the team  was concerned about the level of porpoising from the early laps of the race in Vegas and while they were able to monitor the situation better on Lando’s car using telemetry data, it was made more difficult on Oscar’s car after they lost one of his sensors used to establish ride height. He said they could see there was a “high level of skid wear energy”, which is why the drivers were asked to lift and coast, but they were not able to mitigate the situation.

So now we head to Qatar. Lando needs to earn at least 2 points over Max and Oscar to take back the Championship. TWO POINTS. If Lando can handle the pressure, they have a good car for the Losail Circuit and he drives well there. He’s placed 3rd for the past 2 years in a much lesser car, and honestly, as a lesser driver. This is definitely Peak Lando coinciding with Peak McLaren. Is it enough for a Driver Championship? Or will Max keep the 1 for 2026? We’ll find out Sunday.

11/28 Update: In an F1TV Weekend Warmup interview, Andrea Stella said they will challenge the FIA to make changes to the Stewards options for penalties. He said: “When it comes to technical infringements, there’s no proportionality. We were off by .012mm, and yet this leads to a disqualification. So there’s a point of discussion for making sure that when infringements are minor, and when infringements are totally unintended, and related to something that happens that the team was not in condition to control, ideally, you have proportional consequences; repercussions, rather than such severe kinds of consequences.”