While teams like Alpine and Aston Martin profited off the momentum at the Dutch Grand Prix, one team that didn’t was McLaren. After an impressive qualifying where Lando Norris finished P2, the race did not play out in his favour. A mix of tough battles, bad strategy calls, relatively disappointing race pace and unpredictable weather led to a P7 finish in the race.
Photo Credit: McLaren Racing
Norris was incredibly blunt discussing his race, saying that the McLaren’s race pace was “terrible” compared to his competitors like Fernando Alonso, and that the missed strategy opportunities, like failing to pit after the rainfall during the first lap of the race, led to his demise.
“There are times when it’s down to pace and times when it’s down to strategy, and the strategy is what messed us up today.
“I don’t think the pace is bad, the pace was okay. Not good enough, if you want to say what was our pace compared to Aston’s? It was pretty terrible. Compared to Mercedes? Pretty terrible.
“So our pace today was a long way off our pace that we showed yesterday in qualifying. And our one-lap is still a lot more competitive than our race pace.
“I think that’s becoming more and more evident. And we’re doing whatever we can to fix it and make steps forward, but at the minute it’s nowhere near enough.”
Photo Credit: McLaren Racing
The bluntness continued when returning to talk about the strategy calls in the beginning of the race. He reiterated that he should have pitted once the rain started to pit and get inters. Meanwhile, he gave the team credit when rain begun again before the red flag which partially redeemed his race and allowed him to jump Russell.
“I think it’s clear we made the wrong decision, and we made a bad decision.
“It’s something we’ll review and talk about and discuss because I guess we’ve made a couple this season and we’ve lost too many positions and lost a lot of points throughout this year with a couple of these things.
“The second part of the race we made up for it, well not made up for it, but we made the right decision and were one of the first ones to box [when the rain returned], and we gained some time, we gained a position on George [Russell] and things like that. But the first one was just, not great.”
This is not the first time that McLaren has been hurt by bad strategy calls. Norris started on pole in the 2021 Russian Grand Prix, and as the race in Sochi reached its closing stages with the Brit in the lead, the rain came along.
From there, Norris did not box and paid the price for it as the track quickly got very wet. When comparing this race and Sochi 2021, Norris put the differences aside and said that the circumstances were different, defending his team and stating that everyone can make mistakes.
“It changes. I think there are plenty of times when we’ve made the right decisions, and good decisions, and gained. I think generally you remember more the ones that you lose on than those you gain on.”
“I don’t think it’s really the same thing. I think that they’re quite different, and I think we’ve made some good steps, and some good progress with a lot of it. A day like today it was evident we were a long way from where we needed to be.”
Photo Credit: McLaren Racing
