Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has questioned whether McLaren is feeling pressure amid the climax of this year’s Formula 1 championship.
The Woking-based squad was guilty of a poorly executed strategy at the Qatar Grand Prix, dropping the ball with Red Bull and Max Verstappen leapfrogging Oscar Piastri to the race win.
McLaren opted to leave both cars out under the Safety Car when most cars, including Verstappen, boxed on Lap 7, with teams subject to a 25-lap maximum stint set before the event.
In doing so, Verstappen now sits four points ahead of Piastri and 12 behind leader Lando Norris going into this weekend’s season finale in Abu Dhabi.
After the race in Doha, Wolff revealed how for McLaren, it is harder to be in the position of ‘hunted’ not ‘hunter’, and that perhaps the pressure is permeating into the papaya team’s ranks.
“Everybody tries to do their best and we discussed it this morning, it’s a super boring strategy if you have a Safety Car, but at that stage you have no choice than to take it, because if you don’t, you lose a full Safety Car stop, there’s another pitstop you have to do,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
“And I think what they were thinking is to have more flexibility, but it was still on the losing end that stop. So why that is, I don’t know, but clearly we’ve been in this position, it’s more theirs to lose than Max’s to win.
“It’s always easier to come from the back, and if he [Verstappen] were to win the championship that would be an incredible comeback, and still the probabilities are quite low when you look at the position.
“I guess pressure creeps in and you want to do it extra well, and I think if you want to do it extra well, then I can only say from us that you need to stay in your modus operandi.”
Wolff cites previous experiences to indicate McLaren double-stack would have worked
After the race, McLaren questioned how much time Norris would have lost had the team opted to double-stack, the tactic deployed by the majority of teams during the Safety Car period.
With Norris in third and Piastri leading at the time the Safety Car was called, the gap was around four seconds, which Wolff believes would have been enough to have justified the decision to go that way.
“So it could have been a double-stack,” he said. “What we’ve done with Nico [Rosberg] and Lewis [Hamilton] several times, you just need to create the gap between the cars to allow that. So I’m not sure what was the case, I didn’t look at it in detail.
“I think the mentality of keeping the fight open between the two is clearly their policy. And Zak [Brown] said before, or Andrea [Stella], that if you lose a championship but you played it fairly between the two, it’s the opposition that you can have.”
READ MORE – Oscar Piastri denies McLaren’s racing principles contributed to F1 Qatar GP strategy fumble
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