Lando Norris & Oscar Piastri Answer Formula 1 Questions From Twitter

I'm Lando Norris.

And I'm Oscar Piastri.

And we're from Team McLaren.

And today, we're gonna answer

some questions from the internet.

This is Formula 1 Support.

[deep bass playing]

You got a little question from @theulteriorkid.

Is it true that F1 drivers can tell

what course it is from just hearing

an audio recording of it?

I've seen people do it before.

I feel like I'm gonna be terrible at this.

[cars revving]

Well, this is coming down the pit lane.

Pit lane, Yeah.

Long pit lane.

Okay.

This is a very slow corner.

I reckon it's Bahrain.

Yeah, a quick turn to,

You think Bahrain, huh?

I think Bahrain.

[Producer] You're right.

[Lando] It is. There you go.

It's true.

It's possible.

Theulteriorkid, it's true. Yeah.

So, that was just done via our knowledge

of distance of pit exit.

Yeah.

To turn one.

The distance from the pit lane

to the first corner is always different

depending on the track.

It sounded like we got up to like, I don't know,

fifth gear or sixth gear and then we went down

a lot of gears, which means it's a slow corner.

And then, the next corner seemed pretty quick.

I thought it would be Bahrain.

So, there you go.

From, @jswallow123.

I wonder why F1 drivers have to get weighed after a race.

Do you know why?

So, we have a minimum weight limit

of 798 kilograms, including the car.

That's why we get weighed just to make sure

that we're not under the weight limit,

'cause obviously that's an advantage.

We do lose weight 'cause we're sweating,

we're working hard.

Doesn't always look it, but we are.

Sometimes you have a very hot race, you can lose a lot.

You can lose easily three, four kilograms.

The most weight I've ever lost is probably,

yeah three, three and a bit kilos.

And yeah, often we weigh ourselves

before the session as well,

because then the engineers have a good idea

of what we're gonna weigh so that we're not underweight

in the score flight.

From Juaann_14, What do you think

is the hardest track in F1?

I think Monaco.

Probably Monaco.

Monaco or Singapore.

[Lando] Easiest one to crash.

[Oscar] Yeah.

[Lando] Easiest one to make mistakes.

Yeah.

Most demanding.

You just can't make a mistake.

Simple as that.

You make one little mistake, you're on the wall.

That's game over. Game over.

From @ashlikesracing.

What's your favorite F1 rivalry?

I think for me, probably Senna versus Prost,

I think it's probably the most famous one.

We are rivals.

We are rivals, yeah.

I wanna beat him and he wants to be me.

Yeah.

But, we have to pretend that we're besties.

I think we both have the same goals.

We both wanna win.

The quickest way into achieving that

[Oscar] is by working together, Yeah.

helping one another.

Just helping the team score the most points possible.

As soon as you put their helmet on,

you kind of fight for yourself,

but you also fight for the team.

You just have to get that balance correct.

Points, you get 25 if you win.

You get 18 if you second,

15 if you're third, 12 if you're fourth.

And then, once you get to fifth it's 10,

and then it keeps dropping by twos

until you get to 10th, you get one point.

And then anyone finishes from 11th to 20th,

they don't get any points.

You also get a fastest lap point if you get the fastest lap.

Sometimes you'll see us make a bit of an unexpected pit stop

or push really hard for one lap.

That's 'cause we're trying to get

an extra point for the fastest lap.

And points mean prizes And points mean prizes.

[Lando] More points you get, More prizes you get,

the more money you get.

@nickscotney,

How critical is a front wing in today's F1?

Very. Yes.

[Oscar] It's huge. Yeah.

It's like as soon as you have a little bit of damage,

You know about it.

Oh, you know about it straightaway.

This is it.

This is the front wing.

Yep.

Bit of the front nose.

Yep. And the front wing.

Everything on the car is pretty much aimed

at trying to push the car into ground.

That's how you get more grip.

That's down force.

That just pushes the car down, pushes the tires down,

[Oscar] gives you more grip. Yeah.

Basically makes you go quicker.

So, this is crucial when you're steering.

[Oscar] Yep.

You take this off, you'll turn into a corner,

there's no load, there's no grip on the front tires.

You'll just go straight on.

Just as important as this is, the rear wing,

which Oscar's pre-prepared,

basically does the same thing but at the back of the car.

[Oscar] Yeah. Pitches the car down,

gives you a lot more rear grip.

It'll be difficult to even complete a lap.

You would spin a lot and probably crash a lot.

These are like everything to us.

[Oscar] Yeah.

These are magical.

The other thing is the car is designed

to have a front wing on it so the rest of,

if you take the front wing off,

the rest of the car doesn't really work either.

But, the air goes through the front wing first, obviously.

And then, it goes like to the floor.

It goes to the rear wing.

So, if you lose the front wing or the air,

doesn't get directed where it needs to go.

And then, you have even more problems

then just losing the front wing.

@Nuttymedium asks, What's the driver's visibility like?

Pretty bad.

[Oscar] You see your car. Yeah.

The first bit of like ground that you can see like,

probably 10 meters ahead.

When you're driving, you're kind of just focusing

on what's ahead of you.

Even like, you know we have the halo,

protects our head, but you don't really see it

because similar to like your nose,

you're looking far enough ahead that it kind of,

your mind just blurs it out.

But because you're looking 20 meters ahead, 30 meters ahead,

and you get your own sense of gears.

Like we have the gear number on our screen.

Maybe you do.

I never look at it. I never look at it.

Like, you just do it off of sound.

You do it off of memory, Yeah.

off of feeling.

When we pull up to the pit stop sometimes

and we have people all around the car,

you don't wanna hurt anyone.

But you also wanna gain

every little bit of lab time possible.

So, you push it as much as you can.

But, we still make mistakes.

We misjudge it sometimes.

Sometimes you kind of lock up.

[Oscar] Yeah.

You hit the guy but he's ready to kind of absorb

a bit of the impact.

And then he jacks the car up to change the tires,

put it back down and you go.

The first time you do it, you know you enter very slowly.

And you kind of slowly start to learn

how much you can push it, and exactly how long

and why the car is.

But, that's something that takes time.

We also have like a board

that we kind of line our tires up with.

So, we have like a good reference

and we can't see much out of the car

but we can see a little bit sort of the top of the tires

and a little bit above that.

Otherwise, you probably see a lot more people getting hit.

So, our next question is from @B4wekiss.

How do drivers know that it's time for a pit stop?

Our engineer just tells us.

Ultimately, we can decide if we don't want to or not.

Usually, there's a pretty good reason

why they would call us into the pit lane.

You kinda pit for two reasons.

Actually, you can have three reasons.

One, you've got damage.

Two, the tires are wearing out.

The tire's made of rubber.

Over time that wears down.

The less rubber you have, the less grip you have.

So, at a certain point it's better

to come into the pits, put new tires on.

They're always talking to us about

how our tires are going, whether we think we can keep going,

and if it gets really bad,

whether we can keep the car on the track.

Sometimes you might just pit

because the guy behind you is pit.

Undercut is when someone pits before you,

puts on fresh tires and then by the time that you pit,

you actually come out behind them.

Overcut, which is actually the opposite of that.

You put on fresh tires but really the fresh tires

aren't that much better

or maybe they're difficult to warm up.

It's actually better to go for a bit longer, pit later,

and maybe you overtake someone that way.

That's when you get into the more technical stuff

with strategy, which is a big part of racing.

So, there's a lot of communication around

that side of things.

So, you kind of wanna be able to communicate

with your team without giving away too much information

because all the other teams can listen

to each other's radio.

It's why you never hear anyone say

what lap they're gonna pit,

'cause then you tell the whole pit lane

what your strategy is.

From AmberLoungeLtd.

What's your favorite F1 car shape?

Well, we grew up watching like 2010s, or late 2000s.

So, the old cars, like Lando's holding, look really cool.

Much more simple than what we have now.

[Lando] The McLaren MP4 2B 1985 Prost car.

[Oscar] Yeah.

I think I've driven this one.

I think I drove it in Sonoma.

All right.

Just everything's cool about it.

Yeah. Everything.

The colors, the look.

Sounds incredible as well.

For me, sound is a big part of everything.

[Oscar] Yeah.

Cars nowadays, sound terrible.

These sound way better.

Very little technology.

Everything here is to do with technology.

How they build it, how they design it.

[Oscar] Yeah.

Make it, it just drives differently.

Very different.

No power steering.

Now, we have power steering.

So, from step one to the end,

basically everything is changed

or a lot more advanced nowadays.

From @MaybellineGrace,

Do all F1 drivers have a max speed of 241 miles an hour?

Fastest clocked has been 241 miles an hour.

It feels pretty quick going at that speed.

It depends on the car you're in,

depends on this track,

depends if you're in a slipstream as well.

If you've got a car in front of you,

literally punches a hole in the air for you

so you have less drag and you can go faster.

You don't really realize how fast you're going

until you see like, on your dash.

We'll just hit the throttle pedal as hard as we can.

It's not down to us, it's down to the car.

It depends a lot on the track as well.

How long the straight is.

So, when we race in Monaco for example,

we race with the most amount of down force on the car.

So, the top speed is very low.

But, when we go to somewhere like Monza,

we run the lowest amount of down force.

We go much faster on the straits.

From T_angge,

Hi Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

I have a question for both of you.

What are your rituals or warmups you do

before going onto the race?

I always do like a physical warmup before the race.

Some skipping, some stretches.

I lie on my bed.

I have a little massage.

I listen to some music.

The more chilled I can be, the better.

One other thing we do

a few days before the race is walk the track.

To see if there's anything new

that's changed from the year before,

or if it's a new circuit or a track we haven't been to.

Just looking at the curbs, what things to avoid,

what places you definitely don't wanna over push.

What places you can push.

You know, places you don't wanna make mistakes

or you can't afford to make mistakes.

Different things like that.

We talk a lot about the strategy before the race.

So we have some plans about

what we might wanna do in the race.

If there's one pit stop or two or three, we'll have plans

that might have different amount of pit stops.

Next question we got from @samuraisofree.

How does one train become an F1 driver

so that they can also have cat-like reflexes?

We trained from a very early age,

but luckily, I got a pair of balls.

Let's put it to the test.

I wanna test you.

There's many different ways of doing things.

Here's one of them.

Yeah.

Are you ready?

As ready as I'll ever be.

Uh huh.

There you go.

Oh!

Three.

[laughter]

Oh, you got it.

Every driver does something different.

I use these lights, which come on,

you have to react to the lights.

You can also get these glasses, which like flicker.

Oh yeah.

This also helps your reactions a little bit more.

Next question is from @bybrandonwhite.

Do F1 drivers accelerate or break on curves?

So, on the corners, what's the strategy with that?

Normally, you break before the corner.

If you're coming from a really long straight

into a slow corner, you need to break a lot more

than if you're coming into a fast corner

or you know you're coming out of a slow corner

and then you've got another corner.

That's why you see it's lock up

because we're trying to break as much as we can.

That's the strategy with that one.

So, those are all the questions for today.

Thank you very much for watching Formula 1 Support.