“Extreme” changes cured McLaren’s lack of race pace

The Las Vegas Grand Prix looked like being McLaren’s least competitive outing since the Japanese Grand Prix back in April.

Two-thirds of the way through the race, at which point the front-runners had all completed their first two pit stops, the leading McLaren of Lando Norris was already the best part of half a minute of eventual winner George Russell in his Mercedes.

At this point there was little reason to expect Norris’s day would improve significantly. His pace dropped off alarmingly early in his opening stint on the medium compound tyres and the hard rubber proved little better in his second stint. As the end of that stint neared he was lapping over a second slower than Russell, and well off Max Verstappen and the Ferrari drivers disputing third place.

But Norris’s third stint was significantly more competitive. Within a few laps he was quicker than Verstappen and he was soon gaining on the Ferrari drivers as well.

As the stint wore on Norris was the fastest driver on-track at times. Team principal Andrea Stella said McLaren tried some drastic changes when Norris replaced his hard tyres, which paid off.

“Coming to Vegas we expected it to be a bit of a struggle,” he told Sky after the race. “This concern materialised in qualifying and in the race.

“In the race, in the first two stints, we were just fighting front graining. There was no way that we could stop this phenomenon happening.

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“But in the final [hard tyre] stint a combination of various things, including also some changes, quite extreme, that we did with some toys on the car and driving style, the graining didn’t happen on Lando’s car and the pace was as fast as the leaders.”

Stella said the race provided “important learnings for us as a team in terms of how we cope with this phenomenon and with these conditions.” However as the final two races of the year will take place on faster tracks in hotter conditions, those lessons may not prove useful until next year.

However Norris’s significantly better pace in his third stint allowed him to pull out enough of a gap over his pursuers that he was able to make one more pit stop. He took a set of soft tyres at the end which gave him the chance to set a new fastest lap. It added one more point to McLaren’s tally, but Norris’s hopes of preventing Verstappen from clinching the drivers’ title were over.

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