Formula 1 had arrived at the Australian Grand Prix in no doubt that McLaren was the team to beat, after its stunning long run form in Bahrain testing.
And despite Lando Norris’s best efforts to play things down – accusing rivals of being ‘short sighted’ in bigging up his team’s prospects before action had got underway – his pole position and victory proved that the MCL39 is the class of the field right now.
But while even Norris now concedes that McLaren is the benchmark after what it showed in Melbourne, an interesting aspect to the performance of the MCL39 has emerged from the first race weekend.
It is that McLaren’s advantage is not actually because it has the out-and-out fastest car with more downforce than anyone else – which has normally been the hallmark of previous dominant machinery.
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Instead – and helped in part by the extreme weather conditions that the Albert Park weekend threw up – there is a growing view that McLaren’s edge is entirely down to it looking after its tyres better than anyone else.
In the sweltering temperatures of qualifying, Norris and Oscar Piastri locked out the front row because their car was the only one that had managed to keep the fragile softs alive in the closing sector of the lap – as their rivals struggled with overheating and lacked traction.
Then in the wet race, despite some valiant early efforts from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to try to overhaul Norris, it became obvious that his RB21 was simply unable to look after its intermediate as long as the McLarens.
As this graph, which plots the gap between Norris and the lead Red Bull, shows, Verstappen could stick with him for around 16 laps before his tyres simply cried enough and he fell away.
Verstappen reflected afterwards: “If you look at the first stint, we were quite a bit off. As soon as the tyres started to overheat, we had no chance. McLaren just took off. So, we still have a lot of work to do to fight for a win.”
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff felt that the story of the Australia weekend was that McLaren’s advantage was all down to tyres - and this had been exposed by the heat of qualifying and the long early stint on inters.
“The pace of the McLaren, it's just very strong,” reflected Wolff after seeing Russell unable to match the McLaren pace in a race stint.
“Something which we need to understand is the way they are able to manage the tyres and extract performance from these.”
He added: “We have to analyse, what is it we can do in order to manage the tyre better? That's it. We're not missing 20 points in downforce. That's not the thing. It's just, literally, on the mechanical side, what can we do to keep these [tyres] in the sweet spot.”
A surprising step
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella was open that one of the targets for his design team over the winter was to improve tyre management – as it had been a weakness in recent years.
That box certainly seems to have been ticked, with things actually improving much more than it had anticipated.
“We gave ourselves some technical targets with aerodynamic efficiency, but also we wanted to improve from a mechanical point of view and the interaction with the tyres,” he said.
“I think today we saw once again the car interacts with the tyres very well because in the first stint we were able to open a gap to the other cars, which I don’t think is the car itself only. It’s only how gentle the car is on the tyres.
“So I think in a way this is a little bit of a surprise to us in how competitive the car is. But let’s say it’s a surprise in terms of the extent; it’s not a surprise in terms of the objectives.”
A strange behaviour
The advantage that the McLaren showed in Melbourne has left rivals confused because the team seems to have unleashed new strengths from its cars without them coming with the typical compromises.
In the past, teams that have had cars that look after their tyres well have often struggled with warm-up – which would expose them at starts or in colder conditions. That does not seem to be the case with the McLaren.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner suggested something unique may be at play with what McLaren is doing.
“What's quite strange is that they enjoy great warm up, but also very low degradation,” he said. “Usually one comes at the expense of the other. So certainly at this circuit, they seem to have mastered that.”
It is not clear what Horner means by his use of the word ‘strange’, but his squad has been active in pushing the FIA to act on flexible rear wing tricks that have been spotted so far this season - with it having singled out McLaren as one of the teams it suspected of playing around in this area.
Use of the mini-DRS effect would allow a team to run more downforce than other squads for the same straight line speed - which would help with tyre management.
A change to the rear wing checks that is coming at the Chinese GP could have an impact here if it creates a more level-playing field in this area.
However, one swallow does not make a summer and for Norris, the tyre advantage that proved critical in Australia may not be something that stays at other tracks – especially where graining could become a problem.
He cited last year’s “shocking” performance at Las Vegas as evidence of a McLaren car that still has weaknesses.
“I think we'll have tracks where we will be even better, and I think we'll have a couple where we’ll struggle,” he said.
“We've definitely made our car much more balanced across all types of circuits – high speed, low speed, high downforce, low downforce. We’re competitive at most.
"But these low grip tracks like Vegas, we really struggled. It highlighted our issues with the front of the car – the graining, the lack of rotation. We know that, though.
“We know where we're going to struggle. Even in Bahrain a couple of weeks ago, we came out confident, but everyone was hyping us up a lot. Mainly just because our high-fuel pace was very strong.
“But on low fuel, we were struggling. We were not as quick as some of the others. Even if we took all our fuel out and maxed the engine mode, I don't think we would have been quicker. We know we have work to do.”
