McLaren has highlighted pit stops as a key area for improvement after slow tyre changes impacted Lando Norris at the last two grands prix.
A slow front-left tyre change at the Italian Grand Prix led to McLaren’s awkward team orders exchange when Norris lost a place in the pit stops to Oscar Piastri but was then given the position back.
Norris then suffered a slow stop at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix due to an issue fitting the front-right wheel nut, which potentially cost him two positions — and four championship points — by the finish.
“Definitely in terms of pit stops, that’s an area in which we have already concentrated our efforts,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said after the race.
“As a matter of fact, we need to keep working because there’s some important performance that is available through pit stops.
“And we have seen that the racing, if anything, is getting tighter and tighter. So what is the impact of a pit stop now gets more and more important.
“Definitely for the remainder of the season and also thinking about next year’s car, there’s work to do from a pit stop point of view — for what is the execution of the pit stop — but also the hardware such that executing a pit stop for our crew is just more straightforward and more natural.
“There’s still some interactions between the operator and the hardware that should be improved from a hardware point of view.”
McLaren’s two drivers are split by 25 points in a tense battle for this year’s drivers’ championship, while two consecutive victories for Max Verstappen at the last two races has made the Red Bull driver an outside threat for the title.
– Verstappen’s win in Baku has McLaren hearing ‘Jaws’ theme
– Baku podium sets record straight on Sainz’s Williams season
– Norris: Verstappen title charge ‘no surprise’
Stella confirmed that the issues in Monza and Baku were not related, but pointed to the wider need for McLaren to up its game.
“No, they were different. This one [in Baku] was definitely more to do with the interaction between the operator and the gunning. But we know that from a hardware point of view, we are not optimising,” he said.
“This is not because we didn’t want to, this is because you kind of learn on the way. And we know that there’s room for improvement in terms of the equipment, in terms of the hardware on the equipment and the car side, so that we can make the life a little bit easier for our pit crew.”
