McLaren: Hard tyre call in British GP rooted in 'timing' of SC

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella says the unfortunate timing of the Safety Car in the British Grand Prix left the team with no other choice but to stick with its hard tyre call for Lando Norris' second stint.

Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri were running second and third behind race leader Max Verstappen during the first part of the race.

McLaren opted to pit Piastri on lap 29 and to play it safe by sending the Aussie back out on the hard compound tyre.

When a Virtual Safety Car was triggered on lap 33 of the race by Kevin Magnussen's stranded Haas, the team rolled out another set of hards for Norris, opting again for a conservative approach.

But race's control's decision to convert the VSC into a full Safety Car led to a complete reset of the race, at which point mounting a set of softs on Norris' MCL60 appeared to make more sense and to offer the Briton a better chance to defend his runner-up spot against the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton just behind.

• Read also: Norris puzzled by McLaren hard tyre choice, but 'I don't care'

Unfortunately, the change from VSC to SC came just as Norris' entered the pitlane which left McLaren with no time to roll out a set of softs.

"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," Stella explained.

"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 pitstop 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.

"It can create quite a bit of a situation, and it could have delayed the pitstop."

Norris rejoined the track in second position but with the prospect of having to valiantly defend his spot against a very determined Hamilton shod with the soft tyre during the time it would take for him to warm up his hard rubber.

"Beautiful", quipped a worried Norris when informed by his team of Hamilton's tyre status.

However, Silverstone's high-speed corners helped the McLaren charger quickly warm up his tyres which in turn allowed him to keep Hamilton at bay on the race's restart.

"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," Stella explained.

"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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