McLaren has serious problem with pit stops

Lando Norris has been on the receiving end of poor pit stops in back-to-back races. Fans have called it sabotage, but the true issues with McLaren's pit crew boil down to something a lot less sinister and more problematic: ineptitude.

There's no denying that Norris' pit stops have been slow of late. Since Silverstone, his stops have averaged 3.8 seconds, while the stops of his teammate, Oscar Piastri, have been much quicker over that span (2.62s). But small sample sizes can be deceiving and don't tell the whole story.

The McLaren pit crew has been, on average, only marginally slower in servicing Norris than it has Piastri across the entire season. However, when using median, Norris' stops have actually been better than his teammate's. And the average time for the British driver is within a whisker of McLaren's overall mark for the year, ruling out the laughable possibility of attributing this to malice.

McLaren's pit stops in 2025

*Pit stops with time penalties or front wing changes have been removed.

In reality, the recent slow stops for Norris are the tip of the iceberg on a much larger problem for McLaren. Relative to the rest of the field, the pit crew - whether it's for Norris or Piastri - has been generally poor throughout the season. The Papaya team benefited from the issue not coming to light earlier due to the extreme pace of the car. But now, with Norris' bad stop in Monza unleashing a team order controversy and his poor stop in Baku leading to a loss of position, a magnifying glass has been cast on the garages of the reigning constructors' champions.

Below is a compilation of the average and median pit stop times for all constructors this season with ones involving time penalties or front wing changes removed.

To put it simply, McLaren's pit crew, despite owning the three fastest pit stops of the season, is much closer to being a midfielder than a front-runner when it comes to tire changes. The consistency isn't there, and while Norris has suffered the brunt of that recently, the problem isn't specific to just one driver.