McLaren boss Andrea Stella has revealed that the team has “hardware” changes in the pipeline for next season amid recurring issues with its Formula 1 pitstops.
Last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix saw the Woking-based squad wrap up its 10th Constructors’ Championship.
And while on paper it was a dominant year for McLaren, it hasn’t been a walk in the park for Stella and co.
Alongside Max Verstappen’s resurgence since the summer break, the team has also been hampered by an inexplicable delay with its pitstops.
Lando Norris has been on the receiving end of slow stops at Zandvoort, Monza and Baku consecutively.
Meanwhile, championship leader Oscar Piastri was consigned to his pit box for over three additional seconds over his team-mate at the Marina Bay Street Circuit.
Stella stressed how complex the entire process of changing tyres is during a Grand Prix and conceded that the team has failed to get all the aspects nailed in recent races.
“Even if we see the execution of the pitstop by the pitcrew, this is really a combination of the human factor, the execution, the operation, with the quality of the hardware and how much the hardware makes the operation of changing tyres as natural and as easy as possible,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
The Italian was also quick to dispel suggestions that the problem lies with Norris’ side of the garage.
He explained how both his drivers have averaged around each other in terms of pitstops, but Norris’ recent run of luck has probably skewed the perspective.
“For the sake of checking it, we saw that when you average the pitstop time, it’s pretty much the same over the season for Lando and Oscar,” he added.
“I think it’s just a coincidence due to the short observation window of the last couple of events that this has accumulated on Lando’s side.
“But actually, the data don’t seem to support that across the season.”
Stella details timeline for pit stop rectifications
Stella was forthcoming in his analysis, divulging that the team also needs to upgrade its pit stop equipment and operations to get back to parity with the rest of the grid.
That said, he also highlighted how McLaren needs to elevate the efficiency of its pit crew.
“In our review, we identified that we needed to improve in all factors, from a human point of view, but also we know that our hardware makes the operation, for instance the gunning, a little bit more complex than it should be,” asserted Stella.
In terms of a timeline for implementing a plan of action from the data that the team has gathered, Stella surmises that the necessary improvements will only be reflected once the sport transitions into its latest era, next season.
“We are applying some corrections, which will be mainly for next year now,” he admitted.
“At the same time, we are working with our pitcrew to make sure that we can mitigate some of these difficulties introduced by the hardware.
“It’s definitely quite a lot of work of review and correction and testing and practicing at the factory with the rig.”
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