Although McLaren won the Formula 1 race in Spain, according to expert Ralf Schumacher, the performance was not perfect – is McLaren often too conservative?
Last weekend in Barcelona, McLaren scored a one-two victory – its third in the current Formula 1 season. But Ralf Schumacher believes that the world championship team made life unnecessarily difficult for itself a week ago.
“They almost lost the victory,” said the expert on Sky’s Backstage Boxengasse podcast, referring to Max Verstappen’s three-stop strategy, which allowed Red Bull to put McLaren under unexpected pressure last Sunday.
“They were really surprised, and that surprises me a little,” emphasized the six-time Grand Prix winner. Schumacher warns that “Max could have beaten them” with that strategy, believing that McLaren is “always very conservative.”
And with this approach, Schumacher believes that the team is sometimes “not operating at the limit of the car,” adding: “I don’t think McLaren has yet reached the level where Red Bull or Mercedes were tactically.”
He explains that McLaren is not always taking advantage of the speed the car has this year. “And they can only do that, thank God, because the rest really have a problem. […] Otherwise, the air would be a bit thin,” believes Schumacher.
Schumacher: McLaren is making “lots of small mistakes”
Or to put it another way: McLaren can only afford this conservative approach because the car is so much faster than the competition. In Barcelona, for example, both drivers were put on a two-stop strategy recommended by Pirelli.
“I would definitely have split the stops,” emphasizes Schumacher, “because then I could have pushed much harder and taken less risk. They had enough tires.” That’s why McLaren now has to ask itself some questions internally when reviewing the race.
“Why didn’t we think of that? What did we overlook? What can we do better in the future?” says Schumacher, who emphasizes: “They need to learn that urgently. In my opinion, this is one of many small mistakes we’ve already seen.”
“And in the end, they have a super dominant package,” the expert reminds us. McLaren currently leads the Constructors’ Championship by a whopping 197 points ahead of Ferrari, while Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are also at the top of the Drivers’ Championship.
In addition, McLaren has won seven of the nine races so far this season and is currently on course to win both world titles in a single season for the first time in 27 years. The last time this was achieved was in 1998 with driver world champion Mika Häkkinen.