McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown praised the team’s pit stop crew for their performance under pressure when they clinched the constructors’ championship last week.
Lando Norris won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to deliver McLaren’s first constructors’ championship for 26 years. He had a 5.8 second margin over Carlos Sainz Jnr at the chequered flag, but came under threat when the Ferrari driver pitted before him on lap25.
Brown said McLaren’s pit crew “had to be a bundle of nerves, like myself,” when Norris came in for his pit stop on the next lap as Sainz used his fresher tyres to gain on him.
“I would not have wanted to be on the pit crew who needed to deliver a two-second pit stop,” he told High Performance. “And they did.
“I mean, talk about pressure. While the season, of course, is made up of 24 races, you could say we were about seven-tenths [of a second] away from losing the championship.
“Because Lando came out 1.6, 1.7 [seconds] in front of Carlos, and Carlos was fast. And I think with the dirty air there, even though I think Lando had a little bit left in the tank, had he been in DRS, I don’t think we would have been able to defend it: The Ferrari’s very quick in a straight line, Lando gets in the dirty air…”
Sainz had the second-lowest complete pit stop time of any driver in the race. But Norris’s was four thousandths of a second quicker.
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“Imagine: Carlos comes in, he does a 2.2-second pit stop, you know you need to better that. What pressure. They stepped up, delivered the best pit stop of the race, and that’s what the team has been doing all year. It’s amazing.”
McLaren won the constructors’ championship by 14 points. Had Norris fallen to second place behind Sainz and finished there, the two teams would have ended the year tied on 659 and Ferrari would have won the title due to having taken more grand prix victories.
Brown said the team was at pains to put the pit stop crew under no added pressure by treating the final pit stops of the year any differently to the others.
“It’s got to be business as usual. It’s easy to say, and of course it’s not exactly: everyone knows it’s not business as usual. But I had a lot of people asking me ‘what are you going to do different for this race or the last couple of races’. I think you’ve got to keep doing what got you in the position you are in.
“The minute you start changing your game, it’s like, wait a minute, we’ve been doing great pit stops all year, we’ve got the world record, we don’t need to tell them what’s on the line. I think they knew that.”
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Sumedh
14th December 2024, 12:09
Indeed. Those 2 pitstops were the best of the race. It was a massive pressure cooker scenario.
What would have been better is if Charles was closer, a 2 vs 1 battle would have further helped Ferrari
Jere (@jerejj)
14th December 2024, 12:36
I’m positive Lando would’ve repassed him eventually & thus still won, even if he either ended up behind or getting passed shortly later into T7, not to mention McLaren still had a big enough points lead to keep P1 by finishing second in the race with a Ferrari 1/3 combo.
wsrgo (@wsrgo)
14th December 2024, 12:41
@jerejj how are you getting that calculation? If Sainz had won that would give Ferrari 7 points, would reduce McLaren’s tally by 7, meaning a 14 point swing in the standings. McLaren beat Ferrari by 14 points, so with a 1-3 finish Ferrari would have equalled McLaren and won on a countback of wins.
So basically if Sainz had passed Norris, Ferrari would have become champs.
Jere (@jerejj)
14th December 2024, 14:25
I may have got the points calculations wrong, but I’m still positive about McLaren’s outright race pace being enough to repass on track if necessary, which fortunately for them didn’t arise.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
14th December 2024, 15:06
It was indeed a very interesting scenario, ferrari looked doomed when the race started and then they ended up in a position where mclaren could not afford to drop a single position, so it was all to play for till the end, even though by the last 20 laps only a mechanical problem could realistically have stopped norris from winning, given he had a decent gap.
An Sionnach
14th December 2024, 20:26
Even though the team and Lando had done enough to deserve it, I have to admit I was hoping for that mechanical failure to come. I’d have liked to see Sainz, Leclerc and Ferrari up there. Also, I can’t stand the colour orange. With all the things happening in the world today it’s a shame that everyone’s attention is so divided that they have missed the true tragedy of an orange car winning the F1 constructor’s championship. There are so many pointless livery changes almost every other race these days. Couldn’t they have painted the McLaren red like some of the ones from the 60s… and then photoshopped every image and video to airbrush the orange car from the history books?!?
Steve
15th December 2024, 9:09
If only the FIA did their job in Baku and disqualified Piastri for the illegal rear wing.
RH
15th December 2024, 17:24
It shouldn’t have even gone to the last race. A year full of thrown and wasted opportunity and the car ultilmately carried the not so great drivers and the not so great operations.
The technical team at Woking though, what a stellar stellar job. Deserved a better driver and operations combo. Could have walked away with 15 wins this year. But in the end they won the WCC, which is the ultimate goal and is monumental in itself.
Goes to show how much others have to improve to reach the peaks Merc and Red Bull have shown. The latter’s more impressive IMO given they didn’t have anywhere near the advantage Merc had but anyways.