McLaren doesn't expect a full fix for its recurring pitstop problems until next year, but believes improvements can be made in the short term.
Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have found their races compromised at various points this season by slow pitstops from the McLaren crew.
Most recently, Piastri lost time with a 5.25-second stop at the Singapore Grand Prix, while it was Norris's 5.87s tyre change at the Italian GP that helped trigger the team orders controversy there.
McLaren's pitstop issue appears to be one of consistency, because the squad has also produced the fastest three pitstops of the season so far.
Piastri's 1.91s turnaround at Monza, plus the 1.94s stops for both drivers in Hungary, are the benchmarks of the 2025 Formula 1 campaign.
A run of slow stops since the Dutch GP has highlighted that McLaren is facing challenges in this area, with team boss Andrea Stella suggesting a key factor relates to the design of the wheel guns, making life difficult for his personnel.
While he was confident that the team can get on top of things in the short term, he suggested that things remain a work in progress for now - with a proper fix not coming in until 2026.
"We know that from a hardware point of view, our hardware makes the operation, the gunning, a little bit more complex than it should be," explained Stella.
"We have identified that. We are applying some corrections, which will be mainly for next year now.
"But 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.
"There is quite a lot of work of review and correction and testing and practising at the factory with the rig. It's a very holistic and wide activity.
"But I'm happy with what I see in terms of review and action and planning for the future."
Equal treatment
The way that the slow stops have impacted races and the F1 title fight between Piastri and Norris has put an increased spotlight on this area.
While prior to Piastri's slow stop in Singapore, it was Norris who had had a run of delayed tyre changes, McLaren said its analysis shows that there is no trend that favours one driver over the other.
In the wake of Norris having some repeated slow stops, it dug into the details and concluded that there was no evidence of things being one-sided.
Stella said: "For the sake of checking it, we saw that, when you average the pitstop time, it is pretty much the same over the season for Lando and Oscar.
"It's just a coincidence due to the short observation window of the last couple of events that these accumulated on Lando's side. But actually, the data doesn't seem to support that across the season."
Analysis of all the stops for both drivers during 2025 highlights that there is almost nothing between them.
If we ignore the outliers that were pitstops when penalties were taken (Norris in Bahrain and Piastri in Britain), Norris’s average time is 3.02s, while Piastri's is 2.97s.
The media average is slightly different with Norris being at 2.67s, while Piastri is at 2.94s.
Here is a full rundown of how the pitstops have played out over the course of the season.
