McLaren’s blink-and-you-miss-it other big win in 2025

In the theater of Formula 1, where fortunes are won and lost in the blink of an eye, McLaren didn't just seal the Constructors and Drivers’ titles in 2025 – it also won the war of the wheel guns.

While the spotlight often fell on championship permutations and late-race drama, the sharpest weapon in Woking’s arsenal – beyond its engineering prowess and its drivers’ talent – lived on pit lane, where team papaya emerged as Formula 1’s fastest and most ruthlessly efficient crew on race day.

And fittingly, the season’s most explosive pit stop arrived at one of the year’s most combustible Grands Prix.

The Monza Masterclass with a Dash of Drama

The crown jewel of their pit-stop dominance arrived under the scorching sun of the Italian Grand Prix. In a display of mechanical wizardry that bordered on the supernatural, the crew serviced Oscar Piastri’s MCL38 in a staggering 1.91 seconds.

It was the fastest stationary moment of the season – a blink-and-you-missed-it feat that left fans gasping and the rival garages scratching their heads.

However, because this is Formula 1, brilliance rarely comes without a side serving of controversy. The lightning-fast stop for Piastri initially vaulted the Australian ahead of his teammate, Lando Norris.

The plot thickened when Norris dove into the pits a lap later, only to be met with a disastrous 5.87-second stumble. Suddenly, the championship-chasing Briton found himself staring at the back of his teammate’s gearbox.

The pitlane heroics quickly shifted into a diplomatic dance. McLaren, hell-bent on protecting the ‘fairness’ paragraph in its so-called papaya rules a dreaded "team order."

Piastri was instructed to yield, allowing Norris to reclaim second place, while Verstappen ultimately took the checkered flag.

That tactical reshuffle – bolstered by the sheer speed of their overall season operations – proved to be the catalyst that secured Norris the 2025 Drivers’ Championship.

A League of Their Own

McLaren’s dominance on pitlane wasn't a one-hit wonder at Monza. Earlier in the year, the team pulled off a remarkable double-whammy in Hungary, clocking identical 1.94-second stops for both Norris and Piastri. It was a display of consistency that made the rest of the paddock look like they were working in slow motion.

The final "Fastest Pit Stop" leaderboard for 2025 reads like a McLaren manifesto. Red Bull, once the gold standard of the tyre change, found themselves relegated to the "best of the rest," locking out fourth through sixth place.

Ferrari’s prancing horses seemed a bit lead-footed in comparison, claiming the seventh, eighth, and ninth spots.

Even Williams managed to crash the party at the eleventh hour, with a 2.02-second service for Alex Albon in Abu Dhabi to round out the top ten.

But by then, the narrative was already written in papaya orange. In 2025, if you wanted to beat McLaren, you couldn't just be faster on the track – you had to be faster in the pits. And as the numbers show, that was a losing battle from the start.

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