Risk of wheel bashing and strategy sets up complicated US Grand Prix
At the mid-point of this season it might have been considered that the title fight between McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri would simply be decided by which driver had the edge to take the flag at each remaining meeting.Going into this weekend’s US Grand Prix, however, the contest has become far more complicated and far more interesting.While only 22 points separate the pair neither has now won for three races, the team’s longest drought of the season.Moreover, they have been beaten on merit across a variety of tracks.At the fast, low downforce challenge of Monza and Baku, where Red Bull’s Max Verstappen took the flag, and the slow, high downforce of Singapore, where Mercedes’ George Russell more than had their measure.
McLaren’s total dominance has gone.They have long since ceased development of their car but Red Bull, under their new team principal, Laurent Mekies, have continued to bring in new parts in an attempt to better understand where their ride has got away from them.The intent is they will feed into next year’s car but are also paying off now.The Red Bull is already a far better and more manageable beast than it was early in the year as Verstappen has demonstrated emphatically at the past three races.As a result the straightforward head-to-head between Norris and Piastri is no longer such a binary affair.
Verstappen is still 63 points off the lead, so the title remains all but a pipe dream, but he is now very much in the mix on track,So, too, is Russell, as he and Mercedes proved that when their car hits its window a further variable will be in play,For the championship there will be more risk of wheel bashing and strategic interplay with rivals than either Norris or Piastri would like,The simple equation of each having to beat the other remains but now, as Norris found in Singapore when he clipped Verstappen and then slewed into his teammate which might have caused either or both of them to not finish the race, there are more pieces on the chess board,Over which neither they, nor McLaren, exercise control.
McLaren did not intervene during the race in Singapore despite Piastri’s protestations but had an extensive debrief after that incident and this week Norris acknowledged the team had held him accountable and that there would be “repercussions” until the end of the season,Piastri, in turn, said pointedly: “We know how we’re expected to go racing and if we don’t, there’s consequences for that,”The pair understand the rules between them on track then but neither can afford not to finish the race which, with only six meetings remaining, could decide the title,McLaren, who have tried to be scrupulously fair in managing how they race and their rules of engagement, will continue to do so but now without the safety net of the pair largely enjoying a free rein at the front of the grid and then in clean air at the front of the race,Neither has won the US GP before and neither will expect an easy ride this weekend but what may decide the championship is which of them best manages the newly competitive risk and reward of this title run-in.
Verstappen again toppled Norris and Piastri to claim pole position for Saturday’s sprint race.The Red Bull driver produced a scintillating lap to snatch pole away from Norris at the finish by just 0.071sec.The McLaren driver had charged to provisional pole with Piastri over three-tenths off his teammate, but it was Verstappen who surged to the top of the charts.“It worked out well, I still expect it to be a tough battle tomorrow in the sprint, but that’s exactly what we want to see,” Verstappen said.
“I’m excited for tomorrow and happy with today.I hope that we have good pace in the race, but we’ll find out tomorrow.”Nico Hülkenberg claimed an impressive fourth for Sauber ahead of Mercedes’s George Russell.A heat hazard has been declared for the second race in a row, with temperatures on Saturday and Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas forecast to exceed 31C.Ferrari endured another difficult session.
Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc both squeezed through to the final part of sprint qualifying but offered no threat to the leading cars, with Hamilton eighth and Leclerc 10th on the grid.PA Media
French customs reject British shellfish shipments after UK ‘reset’ deal with EU
One of Britain’s largest mussel exporters has suffered a £150,000 loss, after three of its shipments to the EU were rejected in recent weeks by French customs.Family-run business Offshore Shellfish, based in Devon, has continued exporting blue mussels to its European customers since Brexit, despite the administrative burden and onerous paperwork requirements.However, the past month has seen three out of four lorries prevented from entering the EU by customs officials at the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer for various reasons, which the company’s commercial director Sarah Holmyard called “subjective and inconsistent”.“We have sent hundreds and hundreds of loads since Brexit. We’ve never had a single one rejected,” Holmyard told the Guardian
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If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit you can no longer join our Club or pick up a Penguin, as the lunchbox favourites have reduced the amount of cocoa in their recipe so much they are now only “chocolate flavour”.The two snacks, both made by McVitie’s, changed their recipes earlier this year amid soaring cocoa prices – which have prompted manufacturers to try a number of different tactics to keep prices down.Club and Penguin can no longer be described as chocolate biscuits as they contain more palm oil and shea oil than cocoa, as first reported by the trade journal The Grocer.“We made some changes to McVitie’s Penguin and Club earlier this year, where we are using a chocolate flavour coating with cocoa mass, rather than a chocolate coating. Sensory testing with consumers shows the new coatings deliver the same great taste as the originals,” the McVitie’s owner, Pladis, said in a statement
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From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states
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Curran and rain to the rescue for wobbly England against New Zealand in T20 opener
Even before the rain fell, the start of England’s winter had become something of a damp squib. On a cool Christchurch evening their batters had been surprised by movement off the seam – “You don’t expect that in white-ball cricket, so when it does do a little bit it’s almost a shock,” said Harry Brook – and becalmed by the spin of Mitchell Santner and Michael Bracewell, and they duly wobbled their way to 81 for five before first Sam Curran seemed to rescue them, and then the weather definitively did.Only two batters scored more than 20, with the dismissal of Jos Buttler for 29, the former captain becoming the fifth man to fall, concluding a feeble start to England’s innings before Curran’s 49 improved their outlook.“To have him back in the side, he’s a very valuable player to us now with bat, ball and in the field,” said Brook. “For him to get us out of a bit of a hole and up to a respectable total was awesome
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