Lando Norris said he and McLaren simply rolled the dice and lost after a calamitous strategy call squandered a golden opportunity for at least a podium at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri locked out the second row of the grid behind Mercedes but were the only drivers to start Sunday’s race on the intermediate wet tyre.
While most drivers had gone to the grid on intermediate tyres, every other team had switched back to dry tyres before the start of the race -- while it was still drizzling as lights out approached, it was not as heavy as had been forecasted and appeared to be easing up.
Briefly the call appeared to have been a masterstroke, with Norris launching into the lead at the start and briefly building a small gap, but he quickly had to pit for dry tyres, shortly after Piastri had done so in the sister car.
The early stops dropped both drivers out of contention -- neither finished the race, as Lewis Ferrari’s Hamilton and Red Bulls Max Verstappen capitalised on George Russell’s dramatic retirement to secure a podium for their teams.
Rivals were shocked by McLaren’s tyre gamble.
Asked what he thought about it after the race, Verstappen laughed and said: “That was a great call. I was like, ‘Thank you!’”
Norris said he knew pretty quickly he and his teammate were on the wrong tyres.
“Probably just on the warmup lap,” he said about when the realisation dawned on him.
“I think the rain already stopped a little bit by then, so, yeah, it was the wrong decision in hindsight. Obviously, it was good for a lap and kept me out of trouble, and so easily things could have happened behind, and I would have looked much better, but it was the wrong decision in the end.
“But I don’t think through any bad decision-making. There were valid reasons for doing what we did. I’m happy we went for something and stuck to it. It doesn’t work out sometimes, that’s the way it is, so we take it on the chin, and we learn from it.”
McLaren’s decision was also not helped by the fact that there were two aborted starts -- the first because Arvid Linbdlad’s Racing Bulls had stalled on the grid, before another where the yellow lights stayed on when the field had completed an additional formation lap to return to the grid.
That wasted valuable time when the track was still wet.
During those extra formation laps, broadcasted radio messaged from Norris and Piastri made it clear both drivers felt like a stop at that point -- effectively starting from the pit-lane -- would have been the better option than what followed.
Team boss Andrea Stella alluded to this when he explained the process behind the decision.
“You have to consider the tyres are fitted five mins before the start and at seven minutes, when we needed to make a decision, in our view the track was greasy, already there were troubles to keep them in temps on a dry track,” Stella said on Sunday evening.
“But at the time it was greasy, it was raining, at the time we thought you have to make a decision as to what tyres, that was the right tyres for the moment.
“After that the rain very rapidly stopped, and also there was a double formation lap which I think took the best out of this decision out, I would have been pretty interested in seeing the cars with the dry tyres if the race started at the time it should have started.
“I think a bit unlucky with the fact the rain just stopped and the fact there was a double extra formation lap which I’m not sure [when] is the last time we saw it, in hindsight we were penalised by the decision, but at the time that the decision needed to be made I think the conditions existed to fit an intermediate tyre.
“It just changed very rapidly. In terms of making the decision actually it was relatively shared by the people and the drivers, I even gave my input myself, like I said before a call needed to be made, I just wanted to be sure we were on tyres that we could withstand the first lap.”
