Tag Archives: McLaren

Norris just missed out in Spain – but his strategy was not impacted by his start

McLaren boss Andrea Stella says that the team was “surprised” by how early rivals pitted in the Spanish GP, and he insists that Lando Norris’s strategy was not affected by his bad first lap dropping him from pole to third.

Norris was stuck behind George Russell in the opening stint, and despite the Mercedes driver pitting on lap 15 and leader Max Verstappen coming in on lap 17 Norris stayed out until lap 23, giving himself a six-lap tyre offset on the Dutchman.

At the second stops Norris pitted three laps later than Verstappen, but despite a charging final stint on his younger soft tyres Norris came up just short in second place.

Stella says that the pit stop timing would have been similar even if Norris hadn’t been stuck behind Russell in the early stages.

“I think we would have done exactly the same strategy, even leading, because we are in Barcelona,” he said.

“In Monaco, we would have done a different strategy. We were very surprised when we saw people go in lap 16-17, for me, that’s a bit of self-inflicted pain at this circuit, because the degradation is so high, overtaking is easy.

“So actually we thought this is going to bring us back in the race, and we went for our race. We just lost a little bit too long behind Russell at the start. Otherwise the race would have come to us at the end of the 66 laps.

“I would like to praise the good work of our strategists, because somehow this is what we had in mind, and it sort of unfolded the way we thought it would.

“Should people just feel the pressure to go and pit?  Obviously, sometimes the pressure to go and pit depends on how you use your tyres, and sometimes you just have to beat, if that makes sense. But here it can be very costly if you start pitting too early.”

Stella admitted that setbacks such as Norris getting caught behind Russell and a slightly long second stop can be very costly given the competitiveness of the field.

“It’s the second time that the gaps in qualifying are under 20 milliseconds,” he said.

“Everything is getting extremely tight, which means that the details, they do become very important, because you have no margin in which you can compensate any little imprecision.

“I would say that, as for today, the main factor is that we couldn’t defend the first position in Barcelona.

“This is not necessarily a surprise, because you have such a long run to corner one, the cars run high downforce, so as soon as you gain a bit of slipstream, it makes you so much faster than the car ahead, which meant that Lando was not in condition to defend his pole position.

“And I actually appreciated this wise approach, whereby stay out of trouble, the race we know is going to come to us. Just the time lost behind Russell, it was too much.

“So I would say that a couple of positions lost at corner one, and the time lost behind Russell, they are the two decisive factors. The pit stop probably another one second.

“But in fairness, even the one second, if we were in behind Verstappen at the start, I think we could have played our cards with good chances.”

Stella said that McLaren and Red Bull were well matched on overall performance.

“I think the race pace was very, very similar, very, very similar,” he said. “I think the fact that we were faster at the end is because we had fresher tyres. The fact that he was faster at the start is because we were behind Russell.

“It would almost look like the great balance of performance that we had in qualifying, parity of performance, almost transferred into the race, where normally you have some variations as a function of how you interact with the tyres.

“But actually today, I think it was very similar, which, once again, on a track that is so demanding on tyres, so demanding on aerodynamics, I think that’s really good news for the progress that we have made with the performance of the car.”

After the race a clearly frustrated Norris said he should have won, and blamed himself for the start.

“The fact that Lando is self-critical is a style, and sometimes we react very much on the style rather than on the content of things,” he said.

“I think actually, Lando’s start wasn’t very bad at all. It was decent start, like he is almost one car ahead of Max. 

“The fact is that Russell got the double slipstream of Lando and Max, and in corner one, I think Lando was just very wise, because it’s a second and your race is gone, and that’s not the way we want to race. We want to stay in the race.

“So I think from an opportunity point of view, as was said before, it’s more of a detail. Okay, you can do an even better start. You could have been one metre ahead, but it’s very, very marginal. And the fact that Lando might have been harsh on himself in terms of the responsibility for that, I think, is just a style aspect.

“Some of the drivers would have complained. ‘Oh, Barcelona, the straight is too long.’ Actually, I like that people look at their own opportunities before thinking that the world plays against you. I mean, that’s the way you actually work on the variables that you can control.

“We don’t overreact to the style of Lando being tough with himself. Certainly I’m sure this is something that he will keep fine tuning over the years. But from Lando’s point of view, I think he just drove very well the entire weekend.

“And if he is upset for a P2, finishing two seconds from Max, then this is really good news for everyone, including F1, because it means that we have races, and it means that with little details like defending your pole position, we finally can have some different winners than Max.”

Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner says that Max Verstappen has been showing why he is a World Champion in the close fight with Lando Norris and McLaren in recent races.

Norris took pole for the Spanish GP but was passed by Verstappen at the start, with both men also initially losing out to George Russell.

McLaren put Norris on an offset strategy with longer stints, and while he got close to Verstappen by the flag, he came up just short.

Norris himself admitted that he should have won the race, and Horner acknowledged that had Norris made a better start and not dropped to a third from pole the race might have turned out differently.

“I think if Lando would have had track position, it would have been difficult to beat him today,” said Horner.

“It was so close between the two of them who were then circa 18 seconds ahead of the rest of the field. So I would say that Lando has emerged from the pack as the most consistent challenger.”

He added: “I think the McLaren looked fast, certainly at the end of the stints, which is something that we’ve seen at a couple of races now.

“So their degradation seems to be good, but that’s a little bit offset by the strategy and the overlap in the tyre life.

“We had enough today to get the job done. And it was a seventh victory out of 10 races. Four of them have been very hard.

“But again, the team working at a level where we’re still delivering the pit stops at 1.7 seconds, and strategy, etc. But Max, again, demonstrated why he’s the World Champion. At the key, key moments, he delivers.”

Horner admitted that this year has been much tougher for Verstappen and his team than 2023.

“He’s fantastic under pressure,” said Horner. “He’s always been fantastic. And last year was a unicorn year, now is a more normal year where it’s not normal to win all the races all the time, and we’re having to fight very, very hard for them.

“Max is making the key difference. But we know where we need to improve. We’re getting a better understanding of where our strengths and weaknesses are, and we’re doing enough at the moment to keep growing that championship lead.”

Regarding how the Spanish GP panned out Horner said that getting ahead of Norris at the start was crucial, although both men were passed by Russell.

“I think today there were a few decisive moments,” he said when asked by this writer about the race. “Obviously we lost the pole by two-hundredths yesterday, and we knew it was going to be very tight with Lando. So the start was crucial.

“We took the start on the on the scrub tyre, rather than the new tyre, because we wanted to have the new tyre, because we thought we might need it for an undercut later in the race. Max had a good start, managed to get alongside Lando.

“Then fairly robust racing, where he’s on the grass on the way down to Turn 1, which then allowed George to pick out his braking point and go around the outside. So job one was passing Lando into Turn 1.”

Horner stressed that getting past Russell allowed Verstappen to control the race and run his own strategy.

“And then it was a race that was always going to be dominated about tyre wear, and so being quick to pass George was crucial,” he noted.

“And he pushed hard on that first lap or two to get the pass on George, as soon as DRS opened, and then immediately got into managing the tyres, and was able to build out a gap reasonably comfortably in that in that first stint.

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“At that point we decided to go for an optimum race in terms of the strategy and our stop laps, and McLaren obviously extended, so they go off an optimum race, so they have an offset.

“So you look at the gap and you think, oh, nine seconds looks pretty decent. But with the tyre offset of six laps I think it was on a medium, and then three or four on the soft, those gaps come back at you pretty quickly. So today was all about not making any mistakes.

“And Max drove a perfect race. I think the strategy was spot-on, well executed pit stops. And so it’s all those small details. We knew that Lando would come back towards us at the end of the race, but we felt we should have just enough in hand, which is the way it played out.”

Horner admitted that it was a far from easy victory for Verstappen: “You could see that to the guys were going flat out, and because we get the GPS data, as all the teams do of the other cars, we could see Lando wasn’t saving anything in Turn 3 and 9, and the last two turns.

“So then the information is given to Max to say you can start pushing. And he’s got such capacity in his driving, he knows the stint length, he knows what he needs to take out of the tyres. And that’s where he really is a masterclass.”

Perez has again struggled to match the form of his team mate in Spain

Sergio Perez admits that he expects a “long afternoon” after being consigned to 11^th on the grid for the Spanish GP.

The Red Bull driver came to Barcelona carrying a three-place grid penalty from Canada, and after difficult weekends in Monaco and Montreal he has once again struggled to match team mate Max Verstappen.

He was eighth in each of the three qualifying sessions, with the penalty pushing him outside the top 10 for the start.

Nevertheless he believes that he will be in better shape for the race.

“I think we were finding the light out of the tunnel,” he said when asked by this writer about his session.

“Unfortunately, my final sector in Q3 was a little bit too poor. I lost a bit too much compared to myself, I think we could have been a lot closer. We only had one single set, so that made things a little bit tricky. The wind changed a bit.

“But overall, I think we’ve been a little bit too far this weekend. We’ve been chasing the balance every now and then, but I feel like we’ve done some good steps, which made me feel a little bit more comfortable.

“Margins are so small. I think to really find those tenths, I needed the progression, and I didn’t have that progression through the weekend. So we’ll work on that, and hopefully tomorrow we’ll have a good race car.

“We have to work a lot on that as well. So we’ve compromised a little bit qualifying for hopefully good tyre degradation.”

Regarding that focus on the race set-up he added: “I think we needed to be really good and strong on that regard.

“So tomorrow is going to be a long afternoon, so hopefully we are able to clear the people ahead quickly, and make progress early on in the race.”

Perez noted a recent simulator session in Milton Keynes brought mixed results.

“I think we explored the car a lot, he said. “I think we struggled a lot more than we anticipated in Barcelona. Obviously, the correlation sometimes can be good, sometimes not. I think tyre issues have been also a bit of a standout.

“So it’s been quite hard to pick up a direction over the weekend. But I think we’re just getting there, and hopefully tomorrow we are able to show some good race pace and turn the page quickly.”

Norris eventually finished second after leading comfortably

McLaren F1 boss Andrea Stella says that Lando Norris was unlucky to miss getting into the pits under the safety car in the Canadian GP by just 1.5 seconds.

Stella also admits that the team could have done a better job with keeping its driver informed about what to do.

In what was in effect the reverse of what happened in Miami race leader Norris just missed the pit entry when a safety car was called for after Logan Sargeant crashed.

The cars immediately behind were able to stop and fit fresh inters ahead of an expected rain shower.

When Norris emerged after pitting on the following lap he was down in third, behind Max Verstappen – who lost out in Miami – and George Russell.

After an eventful race Norris did eventually finish ahead of Russell in second, but the missing the chance to pit made his afternoon a lot harder.

“It looks like he was one and a half seconds from the pit, from the line actually where you needed to turn, or go straight,” said Stella.

“In hindsight, we could have told the driver ‘in case of safety car pit’, so he would have just reacted instantly to just pit.

“But we were monitoring the intensity of the rain, and this intensity, in the last few minutes, was kind of reducing, so we didn’t want to pit unnecessarily for a new set of inters when this set of inters could have been good enough in case of a very light rain.

“I think it was much easier for the car behind to do the opposite for instance, as Lando. I think that’s a little bit unlucky, not only with the timing for when the safety car, was deployed, with respect to Lando’s position on track, but also the time of the safety car in the race, because at that time, Lando was by far the fastest car on track.”

Regarding Norris’s strong pace before the safety car, when he opened a lead on Verstappen, Stella said that protecting the intermediate tyres early on had paid dividends.

“We knew that it would have not been easy to make it to the rain, expected around like [lap] 30 initially,” said Stella. “It would have been difficult for these intermediate tyres to survive that long.

“So because we had no pressure, we started to save the tyres very, very early, even when it kind of wasn’t necessary, trying to find cold patches or wet patches to make sure that the tyres stayed in good condition for when the track would have been more challenging.

“So I think there’s no magic. It’s just the position we were in the first stint meant that we could apply this strategy with no loss, because we didn’t have pressure from behind.”

Having lost out at the first safety car McLaren tried to regain the advantage by keeping Norris out as the track dried and cars started to go to slicks, as his pace was still good on his old inters.

He finally came in for slicks a lap after Verstappen and Russell stopped. He emerged just in front of the Red Bull driver, but on the wet line, and thus he couldn’t stay ahead.

Stella believes that without the first safety car Norris could have opened up a gap and then tried to get to the end with a single stop straight to slicks. However he acknowledged that Mercedes had better pace on dry tyres.

“I think Mercedes should have finished ahead of Lando today,” he said. “So if anything, we maximised what was available after the safety car.

“Without the safety car then I think Lando could have accumulated such a large advantage that then we could have tried to make it to the end on the dry tyres, but I think Mercedes, they could have caught up because they were a few tenths of a second faster than us today.

“So we really needed a decent advantage to make it safely to the end. But obviously this is a little bit academic, because in a race like this, two or three safety cars, you have to assume they will happen.

“And also the weather was around. So we knew that it was going to be a race decided by various scenarios. And ultimately, I think we are happy with the results.”

Oscar Piastri showed great pace in Miami before his race “unravelled”

Oscar Piastri admits that his McLaren Formula 1 team’s impressive pace in the Miami GP was “unexpected” after the cars showed mixed form over the previous two days.

While team mate and race winner Lando Norris had the full update package Piastri had what Andrea Stella called only 50% of it, and was notably missing the revised floor and sidepods.

Despite not having all of the new kit Piastri ran third in the early laps of the race after jumping up from sixth on the grid, before passing Charles Leclerc for second.

However his afternoon was spoiled when he was hit by Carlos Sainz while battling with the Ferrari driver, and he had to pit for a new front wing. He eventually finished 13^th.

“I think in these conditions on this track, the pace we had today was unexpected,” he said when asked by this writer about the value of the upgrades.

“I think we don’t fully understand why, we were a bit up and down on different days. But I think the fact that we can win a race on pace is a very, very encouraging sign for the rest of the year.”

Although obviously disappointed by the outcome of his own race Piastri was encouraged by Norris’s win.

“I think definitely a lot of positives to come from today,” he said. “I think, for both of us the car was really strong. I think for Lando to win the race on pace, and to pull away from Max [Verstappen] after the safety car, I think that’s a very, very encouraging sign.

“So very happy for him, and for the whole team. I think we deserve it. Our trajectory in the last 12 months has been towards this moment. And yeah, also for Lando, I think it’s been a long time coming. So I’m happy for him.”

Regarding his own race he noted: “I was happy with the start. And then the fact that I could get past Leclerc as well was unexpected coming into the race.

“So from that point, I was quite happy and was reasonably comfortable with him behind me there. Just the timing of the safety car wasn’t ideal, and it unravelled from there.”

Fernando Alonso says that “nice kid” Lando Norris deserved his debut Formula 1 win in Miami, especially after logging a string of podium finishes.

Alonso got to know Norris when the Englishman was a McLaren junior, and especially when he ran some Friday FP1 sessions at the end of 2018.

The following year they shared a car for Zak Brown’s United Autosports team at the Daytona 24 Hours.

Norris’s victory came 21 years after Alonso’s own debut win with Renault in the 2003 Hungarian GP.

“The first win after so many podiums,” said Alonso. “I’m really happy for him. Hopefully he remembers this day. The first of many wins.

“He’s a nice kid, he’s a nice man and a very talented driver. I know him very well. We did the Daytona 24 Hours in 2019 together. He started in McLaren as a test driver when I was there. We both live in Monaco, we see each other sometimes there in the city, travel together sometimes as well.

“And after so many podiums, I think he deserved his win. As I said, hopefully he enjoys this day, because sometimes you forget quickly, because you’re so focused on the next event. But yeah, I’m very happy for him. And for McLaren as well.”

Regarding the Woking team’s Miami form he said: “Well, they were close, and I think they were second in China.

“And they were again fast here, especially on the sprint qualifying, they were very fast. They brought a lot of updates here. Let’s see what will happen in the next few races in the championship.”

After a disappointing qualifying session Alonso enjoyed a charging race in Miami for Aston Martin, starting on the hard tyre and eventually working his way from 15^th on the grid to ninth at the flag.

“I think we were lucky with the [virtual] safety car today, that really helped our race,” he said when asked by this writer about his afternoon.

“Starting on the hard, maybe we were thinking to stop a little bit later, but the safety car came in that lap, and we took the opportunity.

“And then the full safety car bunched everyone else. And we were with the mediums, the others were with hards. So we had a little advantage there.

“So all-in-all, we were lucky with the strategy and with the safety car, a little bit better on the race, compared to quali but we still need to improve and find more pace.”

Alonso enjoyed his fights on the way through the field, notably the one with former Alpine team mate Esteban Ocon for ninth place.

“Good battles, Esteban very hard fighting, as well,” he said. “As always, he’s a racer, but always with respect. I really enjoyed today the fight with him. It’s the first point for Alpine, I’m happy as well for them. But I think Esteban drove really well to take that point. So well done to them.”

Alonso created a stir in Miami by suggesting that nationality sometimes played a part in penalties. He subsequently had a conversation with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem.

“He’s always on board on every opinion that the drivers have, he knows that we are the ones driving the cars, and that we can have some suggestions on things.

“There are a couple of points that we need to address as a sport. And yeah, he always listens to us. Let’s see between if we make F1 a better sport, and a little bit more consistent.”