How McLaren became the F1 star of Silverstone & Ferrari's big British GP error

Max Verstappen took his eighth victory from 10 races around Silverstone, extending Red Bull’s consecutive unbeaten record to 11 in a dominant display. But what will be remembered about this race probably won’t be Verstappen’s routinely perfect performance but the way Lando Norris got the crowd roaring its approval by beating him off the line and leading for a few laps at the start, with the other McLaren of Oscar Piastri applying some pressure from behind.

It was something of a mirage of course, just the product of a better starts for the McLarens which had qualified second and third. But the way the competitive order behind Verstappen was shuffled this weekend was intriguing, with McLaren very much best of the rest, Ferrari falling like a stone, Aston Martin struggling throughout and Williams’ Alex Albon able to engage Fernando Alonso in battle on equal terms.

The pattern of the race, with a very low tyre degradation allowing an easy one-stop, pushing hard throughout, was also unusual. More than half the field had still not made its first stops when a safety car 18 laps from the end allowed them to pile in. This included Verstappen and Norris, who thus got their stops very cheaply. But it came at an unfortunate time for the starring Piastri who had recently pitted to fend off a George Russell undercut threat. He kept Russell’s Mercedes behind but the safety car cost him his third place to Lewis Hamilton who, on a set of fresh soft tyres, was then able to challenge the hard-tyred Norris on the restart. The way Norris tenaciously fought to keep that second place had the crowd on its feet all over again.

Why was McLaren so fast?

There was obvious correlation between McLaren’s big bodywork upgrade (introduced the previous race on Norris’ car and added to Piastri’s here) and its surge in competitiveness. The team is confident that there is significant causation to that correlation. But that doesn’t explain all of it.

The car is always at its best at high-speed circuits. It has very competitive aero efficiency, with decent high-speed downforce for relatively little cost in drag. Not quite Red Bull levels of efficiency, but better than the Mercedes and, especially, the Aston Martin which generates a lot of downforce but at a fairly heavy cost in drag. Around Silverstone, many of its corners now just kinks as far as these cars are concerned, that efficiency was worth much more than the last bit of downforce. That’s why the efficient but downforce-light Williams of a starring Albon was way more competitive than usual and the downforce-heavy Aston Martin much slower than usual, converging them to a point where they were on much the same pace and racing for position.

The McLaren’s weaknesses are invariably slow corner balance and thermal tyre degradation. It switches on its tyres brilliantly well, but even when it’s qualified strongly is usually more constrained by its tyre temperatures in the race than the Merc or Aston. But here on a relatively cool Silverstone day and on Pirelli’s hardest compounds, on a day when everyone could push, especially on the medium and hard, that just wasn’t an issue. And the car still wasn’t good through slow corners but that’s less important here than at most places.

But what about Ferrari?

Unlike Mercedes or Aston, the Ferrari was potentially faster over the lap than the McLaren. Charles Leclerc was well over 0.1sec up on Norris as he reached Stowe on his final lap in Q3, but running wide, misjudging the dampness that was still there, saw him qualify behind both McLarens, in fourth, just ahead of team-mate Carlos Sainz.

That should still have been the foundation for a good race. Certainly, McLaren was expecting that it would be unable to hold off Leclerc over the distance and would probably have a fight keeping Sainz behind too. Instead, the Ferraris faded to sorry ninth and 10th places respectively. Those positions are only slightly skewed by the safety car timing. Even if Kevin Magnussen’s Haas had not broken down with its (Ferrari) engine ablaze and triggered a safety car, the Ferraris were only set for distant seventh and eighth places, beaten by all the Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes cars.

Frederic Vasseur was afterwards frank in his assessment that the team had run far too conservatively. Believing that tyre degradation was going to be far higher than it was, and not recognising quickly enough that the tyre behaviour in the cool of race day was very different to that of a hot Friday, they ran their first medium-shod stint at a pace which assumed they – and everyone else – would be switching to the hard. Falsely believing the soft to be incapable of giving them the range to one-stop.

Running the race in this conservative way, they pitted Leclerc from fourth early believing they were defending from a potential Russell undercut. Later Sainz was brought in to stave off a Hamilton undercut. This in turn ensured they lost out further when the safety car came, allowing the recovering Sergio Perez (who’d started 15th), the Aston of Alonso – who’d stayed out long – to leapfrog past them and for Albon to get within range and overtake. Vasseur reckoned Leclerc missing FP2 to an electrical problem lost them valuable data, but still this was a poor performance.

This was all happening a long way behind Verstappen – another pole/win/fastest lap – whose only concern was briefly overheating his rear softs a couple of laps after the restart and the way the Silverstone winds made the car a little more demanding to drive than usual. Small concerns when you are making history.