McLaren took until the final round of last season to clinch the constructors’ championship but are on course to do so much earlier this year.
Lando Norris’s victory in the Monaco Grand Prix last weekend gave the team its sixth grand prix victory of the eight rounds so far this season. He and team mate Oscar Piastri have each finished on the podium in all but one of the opening rounds.That has propelled the team to a total of 319 points, more than double that of closest rivals Mercedes, with 147. With one-third of the season complete, if teams continue to score point at the current rate, McLaren would clinch the title with seven of the 24 rounds remaining – 29.1% of the season.
The last team to win the title at such an early stage in the season was also McLaren, during one of the most dominant performances ever by a team. They clinched the 1988 title with five of the 16 rounds remaining.
*Projection based on current scoring rate
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This was the celebrated season in which the team’s drivers, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, came within one race of winning every single round. They were only beaten at Monza, where Prost’s engine failed and Senna tangled with the lapped Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser two laps from victory.
No other team has won a championship so emphatically in the 37 years since then. Ferrari won the 2001 and 2002 titles with four out of 17 rounds to spare and the 2004 championship with five out of 18 remaining. Mercedes’ most dominant win came in 2015, when they won the title with four out of 19 races remaining.
McLaren’s performance advantage in pure lap time is far smaller this year than it was in 1988. Norris scored one of their most emphatic pole positions last weekend when he beat Charles Leclerc by 0.109 seconds; the gap has typically been a matter of hundredths and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has beaten McLaren’s drivers to pole in three out of eight rounds so far.
Part of the reason McLaren are pulling ahead so quickly is their rival constructors have been closely matched so far. Just five points separate Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.
Nor are all those teams’ drivers scoring points as successfully as McLaren’s. The Ferrari drivers have a roughly equal points share but Mercedes’ George Russell has more than twice as many points as rookie team mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
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The situation is even more extreme at Red Bull. Verstappen has scored 136 of their 143 points; his original team mate Liam Lawson was dropped after two point-less rounds and his replacement Yuki Tsunoda has contributed the rest.
As a result, while McLaren are heading for one of the most dominant title wins in decades, their drivers’ title fight could go down to the final round. Piastri leads Norris by just three points.
However with such fine margins separating the teams’ lap times, the competitive picture could still alter drastically over the remaining races. The effect of this weekend’s change in the front wing regulations remains to be seen.
Just like in 1988, McLaren are enjoying their success in the final year before new engine regulations arrive. How soon they, Red Bull and the rest halt development work on their current chassis to prioritise next year will also have a significant bearing on how early the constructors’ title is decided and whether Verstappen, just 25 points off the lead, can stay close enough to the duelling McLaren drivers to sustain his hopes of a fifth consecutive title win.
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Formula 1
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- Poll: Have you watched ‘F1: The Movie’ – and did you enjoy it?
Keith Campbell (@keithedin)
29th May 2025, 10:05
I love looking at these old stats to reflect on how much the sport has changed over the decades. Nowadays people complain about a team’s dominance when they have a consistent advantage of a tenth of a second every race. Granted, there were more other factors commonly coming into play in the past, like reliability, more flat out running and more punishing tracks which meant even with a huge performance advantage you weren’t guaranteed a win as much as you would be under today’s conditions, but it does show you how much perceptions have changed over the years.
BenjaminS (@benihana)
29th May 2025, 10:32
While I fondly remember these old races that were dominated by certain drivers or teams with massive advantage over the whole race I do feel that F1 as a “sport” missed out on doing something fantastic in the 2022 rules. While they did ban some innovations, Aston’s rear wing blocks, had they take the time to tweak them and have the cars continue to have the ability to race closer we may have found a sweet spot for the modern era. It will be interesting to see if the new for 2026 rules massively please the sport or crash and burn like I suspect they will.
bernasaurus (@bernasaurus)
29th May 2025, 10:44
Yeah, this is why I’m not exactly excited by the 2026 overhaul. In all the years I’ve watched F1 ever known it to be this close. Qualifying being separated by hundredths, not tenths. Hundredths is braking a millisecond too early, cranking slightly too little or too much lock on the wheel. McLaren might be walking it right now, but you feel like Mercedes or Ferrari or Max could make a breakthrough and get that tiny little bit extra of performance.
But most importantly, I feel like the driver is making a profound difference on the result. When you go back and watch races from the 90’s and you see the qualifying and performances gaps are massive yet teammates regularly line up side by side or within a couple places of each other. I’m sure some very average drivers could’ve been WDC in a 92′ Williams or 04′ Ferrari.
Jeanrien (@jeanrien)
29th May 2025, 16:11
I also feel this year is a great balance between car development and driver skills.
The cars have their own properties and contribute to slight advantages (that vary from track to track) but close enough for drivers to make a difference.
I’m also happy enough with on track battles. It has been years since cars can stick so close to the car in front to mount a challenge. It doesn’t guarantee an overtake and it shouldn’t but it gives a chance of the car and driver package is good enough.
Yes, it can always be better but I would have been happy with another couple of years before the new rule.
black (@black)
29th May 2025, 12:08
@benihana
Spot on!
F1 is doing the same thing in cycles, first there would be big regulation change that every time has a different goal:
-2009: less aero to increase overtaking,
-2014: new engines because the racing became too aero-dependent,
-2017: MORE aero because if you mess up the engine, you cannot catch up otherwise,
-2022: more overtaking friendly aero,
-2026: scrap the old aero design, new engines to bring back engine development.
Every time one team would find a loophole/innovation at the beginning of the new regs (2009 Brawn/Red Bull, 2014-16 Mercedes, 2019 Mercedes, 2022-2023 Red Bull) and everyone would freak out and say “this is not what we want!!! change the regs again!!!”
They would change the goalposts again by trying different things, announcing a new overhaul after 4-5-6 years. And 1-2 years before the new regs kick in, when the older set of regulations finally makes the field more equal as teams converge (2012, 2021, 2024-25), most people would say “oh why are they changing it again?”.
The 2022 regs was an actual good set of regulations, to increase overtaking (with the addition of a budget cap), which they did in 2022. FIA should have take a closer look every season to minimize the dirty-air producing aero to keep the close racing. Instead, due to lobbying? or just indifference? they didn’t do anything.
2026 should have been an evolution of 2022, maybe tweak a tiny bit the aero, ideally get rid of DRS, make the cars smaller, lighter if possible, and if they so desperately wanted, change the engine regulations to bring in more manufacturers.
osnola
29th May 2025, 14:55
Excellent points..
And we all know it.. but only FIA thinks they know it better.
( and if not keep bringing up polls until someone by accident select the FIA stance. Or is so tired about all those polls they do not longer respond to them. So Fia can show the figures they needed.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th May 2025, 14:28
Nah, I think the dominance complaints for 1 tenth advantage are exaggerated, but let’s say 5 tenths is considered dominance for sure nowadays, and not something a great driver can do anything about, which is still incredibly lower than that stat, I was surprised too when I checked it.
Genghis Blond
29th May 2025, 14:38
No one is complaining about a one tenth advantage. No one has been complaining McLaren is too dominant. But nice try.
osnola
29th May 2025, 14:57
So you missed a lot i see.
Flex wings.. tire water (?). flex rear wings.. illegal mini drs..
Yep a lot of McL complaints..
Wer
29th May 2025, 10:26
And rightfully so. A consistent advantage of a tenth of a second every race makes a team win every race.
F1 is so sterile and systematic that when a team has the fastest car, there seem to exist no other variables that can overcome it, no matter the margin of advantage.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th May 2025, 14:31
That just doesn’t happen, you can’t really think verstappen isn’t able to beat lesser drivers on a car that is only 1 tenth faster; the reason he’s not leading the championship is that mclaren had a bigger advantage so far.
That 1 tenth advantage was surely there last year on average and no driver’s championship.
Genghis Blond
29th May 2025, 14:42
But no one is complaining about a tenth and no one is complaining McLaren is too dominant. Mercedes could at times go three seconds faster than the field when they turned the wick full up. Just look at Silverstone 2014. Checo would win the few times Max didn’t in 2023. That’s the type of dominance people actually complained about.
anon
30th May 2025, 7:50
Genghis Blond, I’ve come across quite a few who are complaining that McLaren is too dominant – most commonly in the context of seeing a group of Verstappen fans on another forum claiming that McLaren has a massively dominant car and using it to then have a go at the McLaren fans on that site by claiming that their drivers are terrible and incompetent because they’re not massively dominating the championship with “a rocket ship” of a car.
Bullfrog (@bullfrog)
29th May 2025, 10:36
Ah, but Senna never had bendy wings.
anon
29th May 2025, 11:12
Part of the reason for the dominance in 1988 was that McLaren were competing against a field of cars that were largely obsolete, thanks to the way that the regulations were written for that season.
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
29th May 2025, 10:41
Surely its the increased disparity between winning for 9 points and the difference between that and 6 points for 2nd etc and now 25 for a win and 18 points for 2nd. I remember when they put the 9 to 10 there was quite the kerfuffle, nothing like we’d see now online im sure. Anyway ‘on course’ isnt doing it.
Marcus (@marcusw)
29th May 2025, 11:23
I think it’s the big drop in points for third place under the old scoring systems that had the biggest impact in the past. Under the system in place from 1962-1990 third place was awarded only 44% of the winning points (4 versus 9), then from 1991-2002 it was only 40% (4 versus 10). So a team with a good car could get multiple 1-2 results and the rest of the teams had very little left to fight over. With the current system 3rd/4th/5th get 60/48/40% respectively so it’s been a bit easier for the second and third slowest teams to stay in contact with (or at least closer to) the title fight for longer. Except this year apparently!
Tony Mansell (@tonymansell)
29th May 2025, 12:21
Good stats. It was a particularly brutal scoring system but even though its gone a bit primary school its much better for team morale to score something for a top ten finish. I wonder if the increase in races has had an impact also; if we had 300 races instead of 5 you’d sow the championship up earlier also so… head explodes
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th May 2025, 14:39
Absolutely, was thinking about the number of races too, the high amount of races nowadays causes championships to be won with more races to spare on average, winning a wdc with 3 races to go isn’t that uncommon.
Genghis Blond
29th May 2025, 14:47
I think the current system is fair and also allows fans to see how teams are doing also.
anon
30th May 2025, 7:27
@tonymansell not really – you can find seasons in the past where the championship was settled with a roughly similar percentage of races still to go in the championship, even when you might have only had around 10-12 races in a season.
The problem with comparing seasons before 1990 is that they had a convoluted system of only counting a certain number of races towards the points total, and from the inception of the WCC in 1958 through to 1980, they would change the number of races that would count towards the championship on an annual basis, depending on how long the overall calendar was.
However, there are still seasons within that period where the title was won with a high percentage of races still to go (for example, Lotus winning the 1965 season with 30% of the season left).
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th May 2025, 14:36
If you think about it, the win vs 2nd place points changes didn’t make a lot of difference: with the 9-6 points system, a 2nd place gives 66,6% of the win, while with the current points system, as i 25-18, a 2nd place gives 72%, it’s pretty close, and not many years ago we had 2 other points system where 2nd place gave 60 and 80% of the points you’d get for the win, now those 2 made a big difference, example raikkonen being in contention for the championship in 2003 despite 1 to 6 wins in schumacher’s favor with the 60% points system.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
29th May 2025, 14:37
Ops, with the 80% points system in 2003.
HW Small
29th May 2025, 16:23
As Zak said (iirc) ‘every other team is just one upgrade away from being the leader’. Yes, McLaren are doing very well at this point, but you do seem to be counting chickens a little early.
GeeMac (@geemac)
29th May 2025, 16:28
Pedant alert:
MP4/4 had a 1.5l V6, not a 1.5l.
Konstantinos
30th May 2025, 12:55
Aaaaah, good livery alert on the header image! Shield your eyes everyone!