10/07/2023
NEWS STORY
McLaren boss Andrea Stella has defended his team's tyre strategy even though it left Lando Norris at risk.
When Kevin Magnussen stopped on track and the VSC was deployed, the status quo was maintained, which meant that race leader Max Verstappen was uncatchable and Norris had a suitable comfort cushion ahead of his pursuers.
However, all that changed when the full Safety Car was deployed, which, of course, meant a restart.
However, while those around switched to softs or mediums, Norris was fitted with hards which were ready and waiting in his garage.
This meant that while hunting down soft-shod Verstappen would be nigh impossible, the Briton would be under threat from Hamilton who was also on the red-banded rubber.
"They put me on hard tyres. I don't know why, they're still beginners in some things," joked Norris at race end.
"I think they just wanted to give me a bit more of a test, I guess," he added. "That is what Zak said anyway, probably Zak called the shots on that one.
"I mean, I wanted the softs. I feel like it made a bit more sense, especially with the safety car coming out, but I don't care. I am P2 so all good."
"Under the Virtual Safety Car, we were happy to go on hard tyres because it wouldn't have been a problem in terms of warm up," explained Stella. "But then the Virtual Safety Car was converted into a Safety Car when we were pitting, and everything was ready at the pitstop to put hard tyres on, a last-minute change to soft would have been an operational problem.
"If you have the crew ready with the hard tyres, and you make a call for soft tyres, it means that the guys that need to pick the tyres would have to rush there in the garage, remove the blankets, and bring the tyres back," he added. "It can create quite a bit of a situation, and it could have delayed the pitstop.
"We thought that this is not one of those situations in which the hard tyres have a massive difference from a warm-up point of view to the soft," he continued, believing that while the hards took longer to warm-up once on track, the very nature of the Silverstone track minimised the performance between the hard and softs once they were up to speed.
"We thought that this is not one of those situations in which the hard tyres have a massive difference from a warm-up point of view to the soft. If you can manage the first four corners, and then you go through corner nine, you start to generate a decent amount of temperature. So we kept the decision simple.
"We didn't want to change the allocation of tyres at the pitstop because this could have meant a significant delay. And, accepting that it could have cost us at the restart maybe one position, that was the most sensible thing to do."
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