McLaren is working to end a run of slow Formula 1 pitstops that’s affected Lando Norris more than his team-mate Oscar Piastri.
McLaren has performed the three fastest individual pitstops of the 2025 F1 season, but it has the worst average pitstop times of the top teams in recent races.
Pitstop times over the past six races
Norris (McLaren)
Mean: 3.90s Median: 3.98s
Piastri (McLaren)
Mean: 2.66s Median: 2.69s
Verstappen (Red Bull)
Mean: 2.88s Median: 2.28s
Tsunoda (Red Bull)
Mean: 2.38s Median: 2.18s
Leclerc (Ferrari)
Mean: 2.35s Median: 2.12s
Hamilton (Ferrari)
Mean: 2.42s Median: 2.32s
Norris, in particular, has had a rough run of pitstops with a median average of 3.98s in the last six races compared to 2.50s in the six before that.
Only two of his eight pitstops in the last six races have been under three seconds, compared to five of Piastri’s seven pitstops.
There was the infamous 5.87s slow pitstop for Norris at Monza that led to the controversial team order, while Piastri had the fastest pitstop of 2025 so far in that same race (1.91s).
But there was also a 4.13s pitstop for Norris in Baku, a 4.64s pitstop at Silverstone and a 4.83s pitstop at Zandvoort.
Norris’s slow pitstop in Baku was costly; a two-second pitstop would have brought him out more or less level with Leclerc - though you could argue the warmed-up tyres on the Ferrari would have made Norris easy meat.
But otherwise McLaren’s slow pitstops haven’t actually cost Norris positions - that would have only been the case with the second place McLaren gave Norris back at Monza.
However, the team’s well aware it’s something it has to fix in case it makes a crucial difference to either driver in the title fight - or opens the door to an invigorated Red Bull team.
The focus of improvements
Even before Norris’s slow pitstop in Baku, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said “that's an area in which we have already concentrated our efforts” on improving.
He continued: “But as a matter of fact, we need to keep working because there's some important performance that is available through pitstops.
“We have seen that the racing, if anything, is getting tighter and tighter. So the impact of a pitstop now gets more and more important.
“So definitely for the remainder of the season and also thinking about next year's car, there's work to do from a pitstop point of view for what is the execution of the pitstop, but also the hardware, such that executing a pitstop for our crew is just more straightforward and more natural.
“There's still some interactions between the operator and the hardware that should be improved from a hardware point of view.”
The ‘hardware’ in that case is the wheelguns the mechanics use to change the tyres.
Stella confirmed that the pitstops faced in Baku are different to those experienced at Monza.
“They were different. [Baku] was definitely more to do with the interaction between the operator and the gunning,” Stella said.
“But we know that from a hardware point of view, we are not optimising.
“You kind of learn on the way and we know that there's room for improvement in terms of the equipment, in terms of the hardware on the equipment and the car side, so that we can make life a little bit easier for our pitcrew.”
McLaren’s well aware having record pitstops means little when your average is lagging behind your rivals.
Ferrari is the gold standard right now for pitstops. Only one of Ferrari’s last 15 pitstops has been over three seconds, with a solid mean 2.38s pitstop average.
“It’s no good breaking a world record if the next pitstop is five seconds,” McLaren’s car operations and engineering director Charlie Hooper told the team’s website.
“We make it clear to the crew that meeting our consistency targets set out at the start of the year will ultimately lead to the best on-track performance for the team.
“Reviewing and eliminating the errors seen during practice stops means the crew go into the race in a strong position and is not chasing the records.
“If the crew trusts in their performance and follows the processes laid out, the fast and consistent stops will come.”
McLaren will be doing everything it can to follow through on that mantra to ensure slow pitstops don’t play a role in how the title’s decided in the last seven races.
