McLaren were ‘0.7s away from losing the title’ in Abu Dhabi

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown praised the team’s pit stop crew for their performance under pressure when they clinched the constructors’ championship last week.

Lando Norris won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to deliver McLaren’s first constructors’ championship for 26 years. He had a 5.8 second margin over Carlos Sainz Jnr at the chequered flag, but came under threat when the Ferrari driver pitted before him on lap
25.

Brown said McLaren’s pit crew “had to be a bundle of nerves, like myself,” when Norris came in for his pit stop on the next lap as Sainz used his fresher tyres to gain on him.

“I would not have wanted to be on the pit crew who needed to deliver a two-second pit stop,” he told High Performance. “And they did.

“I mean, talk about pressure. While the season, of course, is made up of 24 races, you could say we were about seven-tenths [of a second] away from losing the championship.

“Because Lando came out 1.6, 1.7 [seconds] in front of Carlos, and Carlos was fast. And I think with the dirty air there, even though I think Lando had a little bit left in the tank, had he been in DRS, I don’t think we would have been able to defend it: The Ferrari’s very quick in a straight line, Lando gets in the dirty air…”

Sainz had the second-lowest complete pit stop time of any driver in the race. But Norris’s was four thousandths of a second quicker.

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“Imagine: Carlos comes in, he does a 2.2-second pit stop, you know you need to better that. What pressure. They stepped up, delivered the best pit stop of the race, and that’s what the team has been doing all year. It’s amazing.”

McLaren won the constructors’ championship by 14 points. Had Norris fallen to second place behind Sainz and finished there, the two teams would have ended the year tied on 659 and Ferrari would have won the title due to having taken more grand prix victories.

Brown said the team was at pains to put the pit stop crew under no added pressure by treating the final pit stops of the year any differently to the others.

“It’s got to be business as usual. It’s easy to say, and of course it’s not exactly: everyone knows it’s not business as usual. But I had a lot of people asking me ‘what are you going to do different for this race or the last couple of races’. I think you’ve got to keep doing what got you in the position you are in.

“The minute you start changing your game, it’s like, wait a minute, we’ve been doing great pit stops all year, we’ve got the world record, we don’t need to tell them what’s on the line. I think they knew that.”