We’ve seen plenty of flashes of dominant pace from McLaren in the early stages of the 2025 season, but could it deliver its most ominous warning shot yet at this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix?
McLaren is coming off the back of its first 2025 defeat at Suzuka, but a reverse of the factors that thwarted it there is what is making some of its rivals nervous for this weekend.
A combination of neither McLaren driver maximising the car’s pace in qualifying and Max Verstappen absolutely nailing the lap after Red Bull worked wonders to turn around a tricky run through practice meant Verstappen was able to steal a crucial pole position in qualifying at Suzuka.
This gave him a vital advantage on race day as the close nature of F1 2025, an increased dirty effect, and the resurfaced Suzuka track making degradation low, all combined to ensure a processional race in which track position was key.
As McLaren boss Andrea Stella said after the race: “Hats off to Max and Red Bull, at this track there were some other variables which you may have at some other circuits, that were not available.
“There was no tyre degradation so you can’t do very much. No overtaking. You nail the qualifying laps like Max did then it gets a little bit difficult to get out of the rabbit hole.
“So hopefully not all the circuits will be, let’s say, this level of degradation, even because for the spectacle. It just creates some processions to some extent.
“Also hopefully at some other circuits we’ll be in a condition to use the full potential of the car, which I think still remains the best car.”
This weekend’s race at Sakhir should, on paper, present that very opportunity. Pre-season testing already offered a hint of how strong McLaren can be as it seemed well clear on comparative race runs - and temperatures were unusually low back at the test, too.
There remains a small doubt over how tricky the McLaren can be in qualifying where its advantage is less pronounced anyway. This track isn’t quite as rewarding as Suzuka for high-commitment, on the edge driving but it may be that the gaps are close enough between leading teams for someone else to steal in.
Still, even if the McLarens succumb to others doing a better job on Saturday, the situation could quite easily be corrected in the race.
Using what happened in Japan as a reference, Stella said McLaren couldn’t pass Verstappen because the laptime advantage was minimal, or go with a different strategy move because it couldn’t risk losing position to other cars by running long and then having a tyre offset as it wouldn’t be worth enough.
“You need seven or eight tenths of performance advantage in order to be able to overtake,” said Stella.
“And normally these sort of laptime differences may be generated because there is degradation in the tyres.”
That’s the extent of the advantage McLaren is expected to have. It was evident in testing and was hinted at in the Melbourne opening race weekend too. It probably would have been the case in Japan without the track change.
In such conditions McLaren is not just fastest, its advantage gets exponentially bigger through a stint. But when that variable shifts, the McLaren is just another frontrunning car.
“Certainly I would have preferred old-style Suzuka before the resurfacing because in a situation like that we would have exploited the good qualities of our car,” said Stella.
“But when the tyres behave so strong, we have no additional qualities because everyone has very low degradation.
“Hopefully Bahrain will be high deg!”
'Severe' tyre deg advantage?
This is indeed the expectation rather than the hope, and on Thursday, McLaren’s rivals admitted this could play perfectly to their strengths.
“This is where I expect McLaren to come into their own, I expect them to be very quick on the high degradation, hot tracks,” Mercedes driver George Russell said.
It’s that high tyre degradation that rivals are fearing could allow McLaren to inflict a heavy defeat.
“It will be more severe,” Max Verstappen said when asked how much of a litmus test this weekend will be for tyre degradation versus McLaren.
“I mean, the first stint in Australia we got destroyed. Also with the overheating and deg in general. Same in China. I would say to a certain extent also in Suzuka, but you can't pass - because Lando was closing up to me in the end of that first stint again, and I knew that was coming. I was just driving to my own pace. But I think because the track temp dropped quite a bit on the day, that helped a bit.
“Here it's going to be hot - of course you drive in the night, so it'll cool down a little bit, but still hot. Aggressive Tarmac. On paper, from what we've seen so far this season, that's not, let's say, ideal for us, compared to McLaren.
“But yeah, it's up to us, to try and find those improvements in the car, or the tyre behaviour, and just go from there.”
'Our advantage will be lessened'
McLaren doesn’t necessarily agree, with Norris saying “I don't think we'll have a big advantage here, I think our advantage will be lessened compared to previous weekends.”
Part of that is expectation management and the team knowing it still has to execute the weekend well, but Bahrain has also been something of a bogey track for McLaren in the past.
“This has not been a great track for us in the past couple of years, well, I think even longer than that, to be honest,” Oscar Piastri said.
“So I think it will be a good test for us.
"There were certainly strong points from the test that we were happy with.
“There were certainly not-so-strong points that we’ve done a lot of work to try and improve from the test as well.
“This car is not a completely different beast to what we’ve had the last couple of years. So there are still parts of this layout that, if you were to draw a perfect layout for the car, it probably still wouldn’t look like this.
“But I think we’re as confident as we have been in my time at the team. We are in a position to win this weekend, and I think we have some evidence from testing that we’re in a good place.”
