Lando Norris said that he and his team “threw away” their chance to win the British Grand Prix, after having lead much of the race.
Here’s an analysis of everything that went wrong for McLaren and Lando at Silverstone.
Despite leading a large portion of the race, Lando Norris finished the British Grand Prix in third place after a couple of poor strategy calls from his McLaren team ruined his chances of winning in front of his home fans. He was clearly dejected post-race, where in an interview he said he was “pretty dissapointed” with the result and that “two calls from our side cost us everything today.”
Lando started in third place but lost a position to Verstappen around the outside of Village corner on the opening lap. But he soon settled in to the race and on lap 15 he used the DRS down the Hangar Straight to re-pass Max in a decisive move.
A couple of laps later it started to rain, and Lando had some serious pace in his McLaren. On Lap 19 he passed George Russell and just one lap later he overtook Lewis Hamilton to take the lead of the race, as the Mercedes struggled for speed in the damp conditions. All front running drivers stayed on slicks hoping the small pocket of rain would pass.
But that wasn’t the case and the track continued to get more slippery and slower. On Lap 27 Lando, Lewis and George all pitted for intermediates tyres. McLaren opted to leave Piastri, who at the time was running less than one second behind Lando in P2, out for one extra lap to avoid double-stacking the two Papaya cars in the pits.
For Piastri that turned out to be a race-ruining decision. The rain had started to fall much harder, so that one extra lap on slick tyres cost him dearly. By the time he reached the pits next time round, Lando had rejoined the track and caught up to within 4 seconds of him on the intermediate tyres. Piastri emerged from the pits in 6th.
That was the first blunder of the day from McLaren. Double stacking the two cars would have cost Piastri a few seconds. But leaving him out for the extra lap cost him much more than that.
At the time of the pit stops, Piastri had nearly a 2 second gap to Lewis behind him. His McLaren team could have easily asked him to back off slightly on the inlap to create a bigger gap to Lando. Or he could have done exactly what George Russell did, and slow down slightly in the pit lane to allow time for his teammate to leave the pit box and for the mechanics to reset.
There were many ways they could have made the double-stack work, but they made a poor choice.
Over the next 10 laps the rain eased off and the track began to clear up. With a dry line appearing, Lewis, Max and Oscar elected to pit on Lap 39 for slick tyres. Lando and McLaren opted to stay out for one extra lap, which turned out to be the wrong call.
After Lewis rejoined on his soft slick tyres, he set a 1:30.318 lap time on lap 40. Lando, on his extra lap on the Intermediates, did a 1:36.746, over 6 seconds slower, as the telemetry from the excellent F1-tempo.com below shows.
As McLaren were leading they couldn’t simply cover what the others were doing. However, three other drivers had pitted the lap before. Magnussen, Ricciardo and Bottas all pitted for slick tyres on Lap 38 and immediately started to improve their laps times. McLaren should have seen that and brought Lando in straight away, but instead left him out for one crucial lap too many.
Afterwards Lando said “We threw it away in our final stop. It was just one lap, but I don’t think it was that lap.”
Lando didn’t help matters. He midjusged the slippery concrete surface where his mechanics were waiting and overshot his marks by a fair way. The pitstop took 4.5 seconds, over 2 seconds slower than normal. That, combined with the slow extra lap, meant that when he left the pits he rejoined in 2nd place having been passed by Lewis.
The final nail in the coffin came with the tyres that McLaren chose to fit to Lando’s car in that pitstop. Lewis had gone on to softs and Max had gone on to hards. McLaren had held on to what seemed the perfect tyre for the conditions; a brand new medium.
But as Lando was on his in-lap, his engineer Will Joseph came on the radio to ask him “We can chose a medium to cover people like Verstappen, or a soft to cover people like Hamilton.”
This radio message indicated to Lando that the soft tyres would be the ones to stand a better chance of beating Lewis to the win, so that’s what Lando chose. But McLaren had the data from Max on his outlap on the hards to see that the mediums would have been better.
And so it transpired. Lando’s soft tyres degraded quickly, and not only did he drop back from Lewis but he was overtaken by Max and finished P3. Afterwards Lando said “I think even if I boxed on the perfect lap, our decision to go onto the soft was the wrong one, and I think Lewis still would have won no matter what.”
Team principal Andrea Stella said: “We should have taken the responsibility to say the medium is just the right tyre, we go for it,” he summarised. “I think in checking with Lando, we kind of self-doubted and this led us to follow this direction, which in hindsight wasn’t correct.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner commented “What was baffling for us was that McLaren were the only team that had a new medium available to them and they chose not to run it, which would have been an ideal tyre for those conditions.”
Norris held his hands up to take some responsibility after the race. “I didn’t do a very good job today with the calls, knowing when to box.” he said. “So many things are good, so many things are in place, but I’m just not executing things the way I need to. It’s something to work on”.
He went on: “There are so many good things, and so many things in place. But it’s frustrating a few times this season we’ve thrown away something that should’ve been ours.”
