McLaren Sporting Director Gil de Ferran has accepted that the team “got it wrong” regarding its tyre choices for this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.
Formula 1 teams are free to choose the compound make-up for 10 of its 13 sets for each driver, with McLaren selecting four batches of Supersofts to tackle the Suzuka weekend.
But its rivals all chose between seven and 10 sets of the red-banded compound, leaving the Woking-based team as an anomaly.
McLaren was the slowest team during qualifying as Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne finished 18th and 19th, in front of only Marcus Ericsson, who crashed.
“The history to the tyre choice is the following: I think earlier in the year, there was a general understanding that our car was working better with harder compounds,” said de Ferran.
“Particularly on this type of track with very high Gs and a lot of sequence of corners that it would be a more suitable choice.
“I think quite frankly as it transpires, we got it wrong, and we have been spending the whole weekend trying to deal with a non-optimal choice that we’ve made. That’s all there is to it.
“I read something on the press that we forgot to make the choice and therefore got a default choice from Pirelli, but that’s not true.”
However neither Alonso nor Vandoorne felt that its differing tyre choice made a substantial difference to the outcome of qualifying.
“I don’t think it really changed anything on the preparation,” said Alonso.
“Maybe one set for a free practice maybe, you get a read on the balance, but the balance was good in qualifying, so I don’t think that we lost too much not having the Supersofts until qualifying.”
Added Vandoorne: “I don’t think it changes the result of today dramatically.
“Maybe it was not the perfect build-up towards the qualifying session, with the performance we’ve had. In this event, I don’t think it would actually have changed the outcome.”
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