McLaren has come a long way since the start of 2023 as they now have arguably the fastest car on the grid, but crucial missteps have cost them a handful of wins this season.
The mood after the British Grand Prix was completely different compared to 12 months ago for the Woking outfit. In 2023, Silverstone marked a new chapter for the team as they finally produced a car competitive enough to challenge at the front. The heavily upgraded MCL60 allowed Norris to qualify on the front row and lead the field into turn one. Before he came home second after a brilliant battle with Lewis Hamilton in the closing stages of the race.
That result felt like a win for a team that at a point earlier in the season had the slowest car. But fast forward to the present and Norris wore a dejected look in parc ferme after being beaten by Hamilton to the win. As well as losing out to Verstappen.
The ever self-critical 24-year-old blamed himself for the defeat: “I’m fed up with saying I could have done better or could have done this or could have done that.
“I don’t care if it takes time. I should be doing it now. We should be winning now. I should be making better decisions than what I’m making.
“I’m just disappointed. It’s a win in Formula One. I’m not going to settle for something less when we should have achieved it.”
The decision Norris is referring to is putting the soft tyre on for the final stint instead of a fresh set of mediums.
His race engineer, Will Joseph, came on the radio to ask what his driver wanted to do: “We can choose a medium to cover people like Verstappen or a soft to cover people like Hamilton.”
“Hamilton,” Norris replied before an indecisive second response: “Or do you think medium I don’t mind?”
But it came too late: “We’re going for the soft,” said Joseph. The medium was by far the best compound to have on for that final stint. The soft was not a quick race tyre and only a few laps on it and the front left would begin to open up. Hence why Verstappen was so much quicker than Norris and Hamilton at the end on a set of hard tyres.
McLaren was the only front running team to have saved an extra set of mediums for the race. Piastri used them and was 12s faster than his teammate in the remaining 10 laps. So, despite coming out behind Hamilton thanks to a slow stop due to overshooting the pit box in the damp pit lane, Norris would have probably won.
Pit box error aside, you can hardly blame him for the loss. It’s up to the team to make the call, as they have all the data available to them. Asking a driver to make a split-second decision – while he’s pushing and trying to keep his car on the road on a greasy track – is nonsensical.
It wasn’t the team’s only strategic blunder during the race. The MCL38’s higher downforce setup allowed them to overtake the Mercedes when the rain started to fall and Piastri was right on Norris’s tail for the lead. Just as it was time for intermediates. But rather than double stacking them in the pits, like Mercedes did, they left Piastri out for an extra lap.
The loss of staying out cost the Australian 15 seconds. Compared to a six second loss if he’d had filtered into the pits behind Norris.
“There were a couple [of decisions] that in hindsight we would do differently,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz after the race.
“I think we must acknowledge that in giving one more lap with Oscar, we lost a lot of time before pitting for the intermediate tyres. We didn’t want to lose the time double stacking. In hindsight, it would have been the right thing to do.
“And the second call with Lando, we should have gone onto the medium tyres at the end rather than trying to match Lewis. I think it would have been safer to have been competitive at the end of the race and even with Lewis ahead after the stop. I think we would have had our shot at the end with more consistent tyres.”
The errors come after a slew of near misses since Norris’s maiden victory in Miami. McLaren has had the chance to win at Imola, Monaco, Montreal, Barcelona, The Red Bull Ring and now Silverstone. Instead, they’ve left with no big trophy to show for it.
And while it is harsh to say it’s the team and drivers’ fault at every single one of those races. They cannot afford to be giving away so many opportunities. Especially considering that the MCL38 is marginally the best car in F1.
Perhaps it’s because they have much less experience fighting for race wins in recent years compared to teams like Red Bull and Mercedes. Teams that are battle hardened and much more adept at making on-the-fly decisions that make-or-break races.
There have been multiple occasions this season where the RB20 is not the fastest car. The teams experience, coupled with Verstappen’s brilliance, has enabled them to grind out race wins when they were not odds-on favourites.
But even Red Bull faced similar criticisms when they had the fastest car in 2010. They made heavy work of both championships after converting only eight out of 15 pole positions, before becoming a powerhouse in the years after.
If McLaren can string together a run of wins, then this patch will be forgotten about, but driver and team will have to put together a near perfect weekend. Especially if they want to beat their competition in what is turning out to be a very close year, where the details make all the difference.
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