McLaren managed to develop the most complete and competitive car of the 2024 season, at least now. But they still miss something in order to truly fight for championships.
Some might think that having the best car means winning almost every race and fighting for the drivers’ or constructors’ championship. But is it really like that?
By analyzing the 2024 results, Red Bull dominated in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and China. They would’ve probably won in Australia, too, but Max Verstappen retired in the early stages of the race due to a break issue.
In those five races, Verstappen won four times, and the Milton Keynes-based outfit scored three 1-2 finishes, and a 1-3 finish. The results speak for themselves, and it’s easy to see that after such a dominant year like 2023, Red Bull was still the team to beat, and they had the quickest car without a doubt.
McLaren starts showing its qualities
Then, the paddock moved to Miami, where for the second time in 2024 after Melbourne – where Carlos Sainz stepped on the highest step of the podium – a non-Red Bull driver won the race: Lando Norris. The Milton Keynes team was probably still the fastest, but thanks to a late safety car, the McLaren driver managed to jump Verstappen and actually beat him on pace to claim his maiden win.
The Miami GP showed for the first time in a while that it was possible to beat a Red Bull driver on track. Not only that, the gap between other top teams and Red Bull proved to be smaller than anywhere else.
After the American weekend, the paddock went to Europe for the first time in 2024, more precisely it landed in Imola. There, many teams brought significant upgrades to step it up a notch for the 2024 campaign. Coming from a win, McLaren was looking to repeat its great result on Italian soil, too.
In qualifying, the gap between Norris and Verstappen was extremely tight, but the Dutchman got the better of it and qualified on pole position. Everything seemed to have gone back to normal after the first stint, where Verstappen was easily pulling away from the rest of the pack. However, in the second part of the race, Norris managed to close the gap to his rival and only finished 0.725s behind him.
Once again, McLaren showed that it had a better pace – at least during some stages of the race – than Red Bull. Even though it was too early to say that, they were consistently in the fight for wins.
Then there was the Monaco GP, which is usually a race that is difficult to analyze and tells its own story. Charles Leclerc won, but there weren’t many points of discussion to take from that race.
The first mistakes
Canada was the first time that McLaren showed that they’re probably still not used to winning and maximizing every result as Red Bull is. Norris was leading with a gap of 11.5s and was destroying everybody in terms of pace on intermediate tires. On lap 25, Logan Sargeant crashed, and the safety car was deployed.
It is fair to say that McLaren didn’t have much time to decide whether to bring Norris in or not after the safety car was deployed because the Britton was around 200 meters away from the pit entry. Despite that, considering the crash and where Sargeant’s Williams was on track, a safety car was almost 100% going to be deployed and McLaren should’ve prepared better.
The result was that the drivers behind Norris pitted while he had to wait one lap, lost the gap he had created, and rejoined the track in P3. This was probably the first mistake that cost McLaren points and maybe even the win.
The Spanish GP was also a tricky one for the British outfit. Norris scored a great pole position on Saturday, but as Verstappen got ahead of him in the race, McLaren played a different strategy than Red Bull. As the Dutchman stopped on lap 18, the gap between the two was around 5 seconds, but instead of immediately bringing Norris in, the team opted to create a tire delta to be faster than Red Bull toward the end of the stint.
That probably wasn’t the best of the ideas as the Britton found himself behind Russell, Hamilton, and Sainz on a track where tire degradation is high, and following other cars while also having to overtake is not easy. Norris actually recovered the time lost and was around 5 seconds behind Verstappen once again.
However, McLaren wanted to repeat the same strategy for the last stint to have a better pace at the end of the race. This time, when the Britton left the pits the gap was smaller, around 8 seconds, but Verstappen had a good margin to play with. McLaren’s bet could’ve paid off since the pace was very similar, but maybe keeping Norris closer to Verstappen by pitting him earlier could’ve put more pressure on the Milton Keynes team. In the end, Verstappen managed the gap and brought home another victory.
The Austrian GP had its own story, as both Norris and Verstappen crashed into each other. But there, McLaren demonstrated to have a faster car compared to Red Bull.
Silverstone’s missed opportunity
Finally, another messed-up strategy that cost the Woking-based outfit a win and maybe even a 1-2 finish was at the last Grand Prix in Silverstone. The first mistake was on lap 27, when the rain hit the track more heavily and McLaren decided to only stop Norris and leave Piastri out instead of double stacking.
It’s true that the two drivers were close to each other but had they decided to make a double pit stop and lose some time with the Australian, he would’ve probably come out pretty close to the leaders. Instead, he was forced to do another lap on dry tires in wet conditions and lost a huge amount of time, resulting in him being 18 seconds behind the leader.
The second and third mistakes came at the same time. As the track got dry, Hamilton and Verstappen pitted one lap earlier than Norris and gained time. The seven-time world champion managed to jump his fellow countryman and took the lead in the race. But the costlier mistake for McLaren was putting Norris on softs instead of mediums (which he actually preferred).
At the end of the race, the soft tires were completely done and Norris even lost a position to Verstappen, who went on hards as he didn’t have new mediums. Hamilton risked losing the win for the same reason, as he was on soft (he didn’t have new mediums either, though).
McLaren actually opted for medium tires on Piastri, and, had they not messed up his strategy, the Aussie could’ve won the race since the medium tires were the perfect compound for those conditions and the distance remaining. In fact, Piastri’s pace was around 0.8s faster than Norris’.
There’s still something missing
All in all, McLaren seems to have the best package on the grid, even though the gap between them, Red Bull, and Mercedes is now extremely small. Despite the gap being tight, the Woking outfit did have different chances of winning races, but couldn’t capitalize on those occasions and that’s not admissible if the goal is to challenge Verstappen and Red Bull for, at least, the constructors’ championship – considering Perez’s poor results -.
The current situation shows that having the best car doesn’t directly mean winning every race. Strategies, perfectly timed calls, and many details and other factors are key to executing a perfect weekend, something which Red Bull and its three-time world champion driver have managed to do for the past seasons. But that comes with time, work, and experience of racing at the top.
Despite all the struggles, the last triple header saw Verstappen score the most amount of points (61), while Norris only totaled 40. He is even behind Hamilton (55), Piastri (43), and Russell (42) in terms of points scored in the last three races.
McLaren might have the fastest car, but they still miss that perfect harmony to perfectly execute race in race out, and bring back the title to Woking.