McLaren

F1 analyst reveals reasons behind CONTROVERSIAL McLaren decision

GPFans aerodynamic expert Shubham Sangodkar explained why the hard tyres weren't a disaster

Shubham Sangodkar

Monday 10 July 2023 09:57 Updated: 14:28

The 2023 British Grand Prix started with a roar from British fans as Lando Norris took the lead from Max Verstappen into Turn 1. To everyone’s surprise, he held that lead for four laps until Verstappen eventually overtook him with the help of DRS.

Even more surprisingly, both Norris and Oscar Piastri were holding onto the Red Bulls race pace and, rather than backwards, were extending the gap back to both the Ferraris and Mercedes until the safety car intervention.

While the top runners who had not pitted came in for a set of used soft tyres with 20 laps to go, McLaren decided to put both their drivers on the hard compound tyres – which baffled everyone on the grid. Norris admitted he didn't understand it, as did George Russell, so let's have a look and see if we can.

The soft was the obvious choice...but not the only one

Mercedes decided to split their strategy by putting George Russell on the soft compound tyres at the beginning of the race. To everyone’s surprise, the soft tyre held on for about 50% race distance on a full tank of fuel, with some good race pace as can be seen in the plot below.

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His stint provided the first clue to everyone else that the soft tyre was a good choice to jump onto, hence Lewis Hamilton, Verstappen and Fernando Alonso made the switch while pitting under the safety car.

Leclerc, having pitted early, gave the first data point on the hard compound tyre. If we look at the plot below we see that, unsurprisingly, Leclerc didn’t spend too much time warming up the hard tyres and was immediately on pace with Lando Norris on the mediums.

This is because Silverstone, with its high-speed characteristics puts energy into the tyres quickly. This must have given McLaren the confidence that they would not lose too much time warming up the tyres in case of a restart. In addition to that, McLaren themselves performed a hard tyre race simulation in FP2 which looked very competitive.

Why did McLaren go to the hard tyre for both their drivers?

With 20 laps to go, there must have been more reasons not to put a used soft tyre on. To understand the real reason, we need to go back to understand the characteristics of the MCL60.

Throughout this year, Mclaren have struggled with race pace eating up their tyres much faster than their competition. Even in Austria, where they finished a solid P4, Lando expressed his bittersweet feeling as he had to manage his tyres the entire race to make their strategy work.

With their race pace similar to Hamilton's, they must have known that they would have to push all the remaining laps of the race with a seven-time world champion in their mirrors. With tyre warm-up not being an issue and DRS disabled for the first two laps after the restart, to give their package the best chance they decided to put both their drivers on the hard compound tyre.

If they had any hesitation about what the best strategy was, they would have decided to split the strategy between Norris and Piastri. However, they didn’t as they were absolutely convinced that the hard tyre was the way to go for their car.

While Norris may still disagree, the pair didn't lose a single place after the restart – and were unlikely to make up any further places whatever the tyre.

Shubham Sangodkar is a former F1 Aerodynamicist with a Master's in Racing Car Design specialising in F1 Aerodynamics and F1 Data Analysis. He also posts aerodynamics content on his YouTube channel, which can be found here.