2025 McLaren F1 Team

[basti313]

Some times 2nd and 3rd will be the best possible, no shame in that. It's a nice problem to have.

As a team, McLaren will aim for the WCC first and let their drivers battle fairly for the WDC. It risks Max sneaking in at the end, but it genuinely looks like podiums will be tough for him to get as regularly as McLaren should.

I disagree with that.
They are trying to have a Hamilton vs. Rosberg "dream of harmony" where everyone smiles until the last race for marketing. Toto failed on this.
AND they are not having a second pace advantage to manage their own set of rules. They are now much closer to a Hamilton vs. Alonso vs. Raikkonen situation.

They want to win WDC. WCC is just second class to WDC.

[Mostlyeels]

I agree the car did not have the 0.8+ advantage to 'comfortably overtake' Redbull ; but is their racing mentality limited to attempting an overtake only if they have the theoretical 'laptime in hand' ? What about some old-school 'sending it' ? This 'playing it safe, not taking risk' mentality will make winning the WDC way harder than it supposed to, I am afraid.

Also, the 0.8s figure is "to attack," not for a comfortable overtake. Possible "sending it" locations: inside of the hairpin, final chicane (can be very risky), neither of which they had traction for, and rely a lot of tyre offset to work (for braking and traction). Pace advantage overtakes: main straight into T1, Spoon, 130R (unlikely I feel with the small pace difference).

For the team, P2 and P3 is obviously still pretty good. At the end of the third round they are:

• -36 Mercedes
• -50 Red Bull
• -76 Ferrari

They are trying to have a Hamilton vs. Rosberg "dream of harmony" where everyone smiles until the last race for marketing. Toto failed on this. AND they are not having a second pace advantage to manage their own set of rules. They are now much closer to a Hamilton vs. Alonso vs. Raikkonen situation.

I don't think the team are all "butterflies and rainbows" when it comes to the intra-team battle later in the year (if it comes), but just leaving the decision until they have to make it (for better or worse). They have a plan, no matter how bad it might be.

[mwillems]

https://www.planetf1.com/news/lando-nor ... gy-verdict

Norris concedes McLaren “probably” should have done something different to Verstappen.

I probably should have tried to undercut, I think,” said the championship leader. “The thing is there’s always the Safety Car risk and so forth. I think I could have gone longer because I don’t think I would have lost position, so that wasn’t off the cards.

“I think we probably should have just tried to run the card and then tried something different. But it just wasn’t. So yeah, things we’ll talk about.

[BMMR61]

https://www.planetf1.com/news/lando-nor ... gy-verdict

Norris concedes McLaren “probably” should have done something different to Verstappen.

I probably should have tried to undercut, I think,” said the championship leader. “The thing is there’s always the Safety Car risk and so forth. I think I could have gone longer because I don’t think I would have lost position, so that wasn’t off the cards.

“I think we probably should have just tried to run the card and then tried something different. But it just wasn’t. So yeah, things we’ll talk about.

Part of the problem in the Suzuka situation is the lack of field spread, and the fact that the marginally slower car led and needed protection from those cars in the midfield pitting. In these situations, and this will continue at many more races this year, when the leading group peel off down pitlane is determined by someone 20+ seconds down the field.

When McLaren do get to lead the early stages they need to be aware of the risks of "playing safe" with tyre life. The alternative strategy is to try to spread the field enough early enough to have more choice of when to pit. It's still clear to me, despite quite valid protestations from Stella, that there's a lack of rocket scientists and brain surgeons on the pit wall determining strategy. When we were fighting for sixth place in 2019 we were conservative and driving to a delta, the same key personnel were in strategy. Now we are fighting for wins and double podiums there is still a lack of adventurousness in this department. Sure, Suzuka 2025 was a fairly baked-on result but these are the times when you try something to disrupt the inevitable.

Will Courtney, chief strategist who's coming from RedBull in 2027 will hopefully shake up a wobbly strategy team. His arrival can't come soon enough!

[ringo]

Nothing different could have been done at Suzuka I believe.
There was barely any deg to give a new hard tyre that needs warming up any kind of advantage over a car that stayed out 1 lap more.
The race was lost in qualifying by a few hundreths of a second.
The other misconception is the Mclaren is a rocket ship. It isn't really. It cannot slice through the field like a true dominant car.
It's the best car but only marginally. It's not good enough to follow in dirty air and overtake on first approach.
We are talking about maybe 1 tenths quicker per lap than the RB21 or W16.
It really truly shines when the the other cars start to deg and their pace falls off.
If there's no deg then the MCL39 is just a marginally faster car with a caffeine twitch in its nose. Hardly a big advantage.

[aragorn123]

Nothing different could have been done at Suzuka I believe.
There was barely any deg to give a new hard tyre that needs warming up any kind of advantage over a car that stayed out 1 lap more.
The race was lost in qualifying by a few hundreths of a second.
The other misconception is the Mclaren is a rocket ship. It isn't really. It cannot slice through the field like a true dominant car.
It's the best car but only marginally. It's not good enough to follow in dirty air and overtake on first approach.
We are talking about maybe 1 tenths quicker per lap than the RB21 or W16.
It really truly shines when the the other cars start to deg and their pace falls off.
If there's no deg then the MCL39 is just a marginally faster car with a caffeine twitch in its nose. Hardly a big advantage.

[/Absolutely spot on. Now can you address this to the whole F1 fans and media that believe otherwise, that would be just great. Just from the outside its so frustrating to read and observe all this MV is a God, he is the best bla bla, when he got pole and a win in a really good car, but when our drivers do the same in the first 2 races, its not an achievement, presumably because they have a dominant car (+0.5 faster). If I was Norris and Piastri I would be livid at the journalists and would start answering their questions on media days kind of like MV did when he was pissed of at the media and only replied with 2-3 word answers. When MV was winning in a dominant car, he was still praised as the GOAT bla bla, but if any other driver does it, its mediocre. LN is leading the championship in a slightly faster car than the opposition, which is a great result, end of story. Lets see what the table looks like near the summer break.
P.S I have heard from some insiders that 1) Red Bull is preparing a massive upgrade for May, maybe for Imola, 2) They are eagerly waiting for June when the new flexi wing rules are introduced as they believe it will hurt Mclaren the most]

[FittingMechanics]

I'm not sure going long would work. The hard tyres were faster and the lack of degradation made no offset options. The only real option was to pit Lando instead of Oscar.

The point would simply have been to pressurize RedBull to an earlier stop. We have seen it on Russel, he had a very good outlap, so pushing was possible.

I know they tried the dummy early stop, but Horner knew that was no chance due to traffic.

I do not see that. Piastri had a nice gap before Alonso to pit into and the pace was there to use it. We saw that he lost 2sec to Russel who pitted one lap earlier. That would have put RedBull into the position of a need to pit.

I also do not see why the overcut should not work. We saw some 33 low and a 32 high by Norris on the inlap. After the stop Verstappen did 32 mids at best. So with clean air, I can not see a time loss above 2-3 sec by staying our for another 6 or 7 laps.
6 or 7 laps brings us to a tire delta of around 0.3sec per lap. With a remaining 20laps to go for me this is a no brainer to go with an overcut and not to follow Max into the pits.

An "opposite Verstappen" call would in any case be the right thing to so here. It is just blocked by them managing the intra team battle.

Sending Piastri to pit first was a bad call. The best way would have been to send Norris first to get a true undercut on Verstappen, and then go long with Piastri to attack Verstappen with two different strategies. Good undercut means Lando wins, any lucky SC gives victory to Piastri, good tire offset gives victory to Piastri, etc. Many more options than what happened. But after the made the mistake of going first with Piastri, going opposite VER was a sensible idea. I'm quite surprised they didn't do that.

Btw Antonelli had a tire offset and he was faster about 3 tenths per lap than Norris on the hards. It is likely that Norris with tire offset would be 5-6 tenths faster than Oscar and Max. Would it have worked, who knows but it was worth a try. Same would apply to Oscar.

Theres much information proffered here in support of what they did for that outcome. Thats, ultimately, just reading what happened though.

It's the task of McL team and strategic arsenal to specifically "short circuit " that status quo in their plans, those to match the output of their technical team in accomplishments.

It was ordinary thinking giving ordinary output in reality.

They state the advantage of two against one and fail to action that.

They need to think more Ross Brawn and that ilk in their outlook.

Fully agreed. We are still waiting for that Red Bull strategy guy to join the team, if I remember correctly he will join in 2026.


Btw I am fully opposed of the view that nothing could have changed the outcome that some other posters shared. I don't agree with that. Even a simple "Piastri pits after Norris" would mean Norris would get undercut on Verstappen and if their stops were the same as in reality, Norris is ahead of Verstappen. But even if we ignore that, they SHOULD have done something different as the way they went about things meant there was no chance of strategy overtake.

Thinking nothing could have changed is a coping mechanism that the team (and fans) should not use.

One of my theories is that they expected to have much better tires than Max at the end of the race and thus, it didn't make sense to do a riskier strategy to overtake him. Why do that if he will come to you at the end of the race. This obviously didn't happen and if that was their thinking, while I can understand the logic, it is based on a flawed assumption.

[MTudor]

One thing I don't get,Lando said last year "fresh air is the king(for this car)",than why you pitted Lando at the same time with Max?!

[mwillems]

Exactly.

Lando at the end of his Meds stint was nearly on par with the opening laps of his hards stint, whilst in dirty air on a track that made following cars even harder than normal due to its flowing nature.

[Slahinki]

I really don't understand the call to pit with the leader. You pit opposite the leader. Pitting with the leader in the vast majority of cases guarantees you maintain the track position status quo, and why would you do that on a track where overtaking is practically impossible?

[basti313]

I don't think the team are all "butterflies and rainbows" when it comes to the intra-team battle later in the year (if it comes), but just leaving the decision until they have to make it (for better or worse). They have a plan, no matter how bad it might be.

I think this plan is already an issue. They wanted to avoid a swap of positions with strategy by all means. So it was clear that they will pit both drivers in consecutive laps, which doomed the chance for winning this race.
And this is how you can lose the whole season.

Sending Piastri to pit first was a bad call. The best way would have been to send Norris first to get a true undercut on Verstappen, and then go long with Piastri to attack Verstappen with two different strategies. Good undercut means Lando wins, any lucky SC gives victory to Piastri, good tire offset gives victory to Piastri, etc. Many more options than what happened. But after the made the mistake of going first with Piastri, going opposite VER was a sensible idea. I'm quite surprised they didn't do that.

Yes. I also think undercut with Norris would have been the way to go.
But as above, they simply did not want to go into the position of swapping the drivers. Norris with the undercut and a suboptimal lap, still behind Ver...would have been in the position of needing to let Pia past. Or may have simply lost the position.
Same goes with Norris going long in the real example of Pia first and then opposite Ver. He would have been behind Pia.

They have a problem...

[Seerix]

in theory undercut with Lando sounds good, did you guys check the traffic and where he would have rejoined? field spread was really bad on Sunday
edit: looks like he would have rejoined around BEA with a possibility of ending up behind him if they pitted Lando instead of Osc, BEA then had 3,3s free air ahead, but ending up behind him would ruin the undercut

[Seanspeed]

in theory undercut with Lando sounds good, did you guys check the traffic and where he would have rejoined? field spread was really bad on Sunday

Right. Everybody paying attention could see the obvious - there were no safe gaps after a pitstop for the top guys. Any of them pitting would have resulted in coming out in traffic. I think Russell was the first to try, in order to try and get ahead of Leclerc but Russell immediately came out in traffic and it blew his chance. It would have been the same for any of them.

Drivers would need the kind of pace advantage to pass basically anywhere on track in order to make the undercut work and not get stalled by traffic. And that wasn't happening.

It was just a bad position to be in, and letting Max get pole in a slower car is where they really failed.

[FittingMechanics]

Yes. I also think undercut with Norris would have been the way to go.
But as above, they simply did not want to go into the position of swapping the drivers. Norris with the undercut and a suboptimal lap, still behind Ver...would have been in the position of needing to let Pia past. Or may have simply lost the position.
Same goes with Norris going long in the real example of Pia first and then opposite Ver. He would have been behind Pia.

They have a problem...

I hope they are not thinking along those lines. To me, the whole scenario does not make sense. Pitting Piastri first increases possibility of him overtaking Norris, not decreases it.

To me only way that makes sense is to see this as a fully defensive strategy by McLaren to minimize threat from behind. They saw Russell go to pits, so Piastri has to defend against that and then Norris goes as well (both to protect against Russell and Piastri). Verstappen was not really the target. This is a mentality of a weaker team, definitely not the mentality a WCC winner should have with the car they seem to have.

in theory undercut with Lando sounds good, did you guys check the traffic and where he would have rejoined? field spread was really bad on Sunday
edit: looks like he would have rejoined around BEA with a possibility of ending up behind him if they pitted Lando instead of Osc, BEA then had 3,3s free air ahead, but ending up behind him would ruin the undercut

Yes, I checked.

So, if we imagine Piastri did not pit first. We get Lando with the opportunity to undercut on lap where he went to the pits in the real race. At that moment, he had a slight gap to pit in front of Bearman (just like it happened in real life). Question mark in this case is would Red Bull have pitted on that lap, regardless of what McLaren did. They would see a slight gap as well. If that happened, then NOR/VER fight ends up like in real life but we have PIA in front with clean air and opportunity to go long (like ANT). But if VER did not pit on that lap, which is most likely situation, then NOR would get at least a one lap of undercut.

RUS was not a threat as he was stuck behind TSU, GAS and ALO.

[mwillems]

in theory undercut with Lando sounds good, did you guys check the traffic and where he would have rejoined? field spread was really bad on Sunday

Right. Everybody paying attention could see the obvious - there were no safe gaps after a pitstop for the top guys. Any of them pitting would have resulted in coming out in traffic. I think Russell was the first to try, in order to try and get ahead of Leclerc but Russell immediately came out in traffic and it blew his chance. It would have been the same for any of them.

Drivers would need the kind of pace advantage to pass basically anywhere on track in order to make the undercut work and not get stalled by traffic. And that wasn't happening.

It was just a bad position to be in, and letting Max get pole in a slower car is where they really failed.

And going longer?