In F1 battle to beat Red Bull, even Mercedes is cheering McLaren's quantum leap

James Vowles, the new Williams team principal, was just three and a half weeks old when Clay took that Silverstone chequer. He was at the impressionable age when Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost were winning championships for Frank in 1992 and 1993. Sad though it was to see the team prop up the constructors’ championship for two of the past three seasons, there is a discernible and long overdue upbeat vibe around Williams right now. Given Vowles’s long experience at BAR / Mercedes and his focus and ambition, he makes a good helmsman.

If the Williams pace was the Friday story, McLaren took over for the rest of the weekend. After an awful start to the season, the MCL60’s significant upgrade landed in Austria, at least on Lando Norris’s car if not Oscar Piastri’s. The team outqualified Mercedes, currently second to Red Bull in the championship. But it was hard to know how real that was. McLaren, Norris in particular, have been quick around Red Bull Ring these past few seasons. Knowledgeable people put that speed down to a short chord rear wing that generates strong DRS performance at a circuit where the DRS effect is among the strongest.

At Silverstone though, McLaren did it again, underlining its progress with both cars to be second-fastest team on merit. Quicker than Merc. Quicker than Ferrari. Quicker than Aston. Back at round one in Bahrain that notion could not have been entertained.

They qualified second and third, slower only than Max Verstappen, Norris by just 0.24sec. The mightily impressive Oscar Piastri was only 0.13sec further adrift. He had the benefit of an upgraded car this time, minus the new front wing on Norris’s car, reckoned to be worth a tenth. It was nip and tuck between the Australian rookie and Lando. Only an inopportune safety car after Piastri had already pitted to cover George Russell, robbed Oscar of a much deserved first podium and promoted Hamilton’s Mercedes, which got a cheap stop. Lewis’s 14th Silverstone podium was a fortunate one – he was only third best Brit this time.

Both Lewis and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff acknowledged McLaren’s quantum leap.

“It was amazing to watch how good Lando’s car was in high speed,” Hamilton said. “We’ve got some work to do to catch up.”

Norris himself admitted, “In the high-speed we were almost on a par with Red Bull and in medium-speed like Turn 15 (Stowe), we’re close to being the best car on the grid.”

Quantifying the McLaren advance, Wolff said, “We’re not speaking about two tenths, we’re talking about a second. We’ve seen it with Aston Martin and now McLaren. And I like it.”

He likes it not because he’s a masochist but because it’s an encouraging sign that the Red Bull margin can be quickly eaten into, although Wolff was non-committal about whether any future Mercedes direction would follow the path of the Red Bull-style sidepods adopted by both Aston and McLaren.

The 30 points that McLaren scored at Silverstone moved it into fifth place in the championship. Engineers work with data and numbers and while technical director Andrea Stella was clearly satisfied, even he admitted to surprise at his team’s level. “Numerically, we weren’t expecting this improvement from a lap-time point of view,” he said.

The data and numbers that Stella has seen from Piastri do, however, correlate with drives that point to a rare talent, even if masked by the car’s early season shortcomings.

“His performance has been outstanding and belies that he’s a rookie,” Stella said after the Silverstone race. “In practice, he was immediately quick and in some corners, like the last corner at Barcelona and the high-speed sections here, he can actually be the reference. At Barcelona, for instance, he was on par with Lando’s qualifying lap – third quickest – until he hit a damp patch in the final sector.

“It means that both drivers can look and see where they can improve. There’s a net benefit in having two competitive drivers. ”

I don’t think you can become ballsy via osmosis but speed through quick corners was also a characteristic of Piastri’s mentor, Mark Webber, who would shade Sebastian Vettel through places like Barcelona’s Turn 9, but lose out in the slower stuff.

Norris himself said post-Silverstone, “Oscar’s been on top form all weekend, pushing me an insane amount. Which is a good thing. It’s raised the level of what we do as a team. And all year he’s been good. It’s not like he’s just turned up here and been strong. He’s been good since day one in the car. He makes my life tough sometimes. I don’t always like it but it makes me a better driver, too.”

If there’s a cloud on the horizon for McLaren fans, it’s that Hungaroring is next on the calendar, a track with characteristics the polar opposite of Silverstone.

“We do have a poor car, pretty terrible in slow-speed corners and extremely difficult to drive,” Norris conceded. “I’m sure [in Hungary] people are going to be saying: ‘How has it got so bad all of a sudden?’

“A lot of it is track-specific. I don’t want to get too excited. Good things have come from the upgrade but there are plenty of things that are miles away from competing in certain places with the Mercedes and from competing as a whole package with the Red Bull.”

Perhaps McLaren fans would be well-advised to have their summer break over the Budapest weekend and tune in again at Spa! But, that said, the team has more tweaks aimed at improving the slow-speed capability and addressing race pace, which is harmed by a propensity to degrade the rear tyres, especially in hot conditions. It’s the other side of a coin that lets the car switch on its tyres so well and be such a potent weapon in mixed conditions and lower temperatures.

“We look forward to Hungary,” Stella said, “to check more comprehensively where we really are. There’s not much high speed. It’s a low/medium speed dominated track. We’ll see…”

It would be optimistic to expect the MCL60’s weaknesses to disappear as a result of the car’s upgrades but you can’t take away the progress that will surely translate at other tracks in the second half of the seasons. The team’s stated aim of podiums in 2024 and victories in ’25 looked like a pipe dream earlier this year, but now doesn’t look so daft.