Lando Norris
McLaren
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McLaren’s strategists have been under fire following the Canadian Grand Prix, after they fielded Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri on wet-weather tyres despite the majority of the grid running slicks.
The Australian driver raised concerns over the tyre choice during the three formation laps that took place ahead of lights out. Despite the ample amount of time that they had to rectify the choice, Andrea Stella and co stuck to their guns.
Why do McLaren keep making strategy errors?
As the five lights dropped, it looked like it could have been somewhat of a masterstroke. Norris immediately shot himself up to P1 off the line, but it quickly became apparent that the intermediate weather tyres were not the right compound to be on.
Once the rest of the grid got their slick tyres up to temperature, Kimi Antonelli was quickly on Norris’ rear wing. The intermediates began to run red-hot, and both Norris and Piastri were called in for a set of medium-compound tyres before the end of lap three.
Christijan Albers blasts McLaren’s ‘disaster’ of a race strategy at the Canadian GP
Speaking via De Telegraaf’s F1 podcast, former driver Christijan Albers blasted McLaren’s race strategists, likening them to Ferrari’s questionable tactics in recent years.
The Dutch pundit began by noting that the fact that McLaren no longer have a car that can get away with utilising the wrong strategy, and so wrong decisions on the pit wall no longer have a much bigger effect on their results at the chequered flag.
Even Aston Martin have had better reliability than McLaren this year. Are the world champions already out of contention for the constructors’ title?
“A dominant car doesn’t mean the team is just spotless or functioning superbly,” he said. “We always talked about that last year, on the strategy side, it’s just a real disaster with those guys. Here, you saw it again; it was a combination of both.
“You’ve got two drivers who aren’t pushing them enough. Piastri does mention it on the radio, but that is only so he can say afterwards, ‘Yeah, I did bring it up.’ But it doesn’t get through, and he drives into the pit. Norris was also unsure.
“They’ve lost positions to Mercedes because they just aren’t on top of it. They aren’t being aggressive, and it’s just really sloppy. Don’t forget, we talked about this two, three, four years ago, when Ferrari was simply written off completely.”
As a result, McLaren suffered their first scoreless finish with at least one car crossing the line since the 2023 Canadian Grand Prix.
Of course, a swathe of other issues hindered their race, too. Piastri’s overly ambitious move on Alex Albon at turn 10 saw him slapped with a 10-second penalty, and a reliability issue on Norris’ MCL40 saw him enter the pits one too many times before he was forced to retire.
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