Ex-McLaren Mechanic Explains the Potential Reason Behind Lando Norris’ Poor Race Starts

Despite having won the Dutch Grand Prix in the most commanding fashion, Lando Norris once again fell victim to his record of having a poor getaway from pole position. However, according to former McLaren mechanic, Marc Priestley, this time around it might not have been entirely Norris’ fault.

Excluding sprint qualifying, Norris has had four pole positions in his F1 career so far but he has never led the first lap of the race in any of those occasions. While Norris has been blamed by many for his poor race starts from pole, Priestley said that his bad start in Zandvoort might have been down to not having optimum tire temperatures.

“I wonder if it’s [Norris’ poor start] still part of this same dilemma that a lot of teams are suffering with this idea of struggling to understand the tire temperature conundrum, which is always a conundrum in Formula 1”, Priestley remarked.

And the lack of temperature is why he thinks that both the McLarens got a lot of wheel spin at the launch. The tires need to be in the optimum temperature window to give the drivers optimum traction at the start. This is the reason the drivers do a precise number of burnouts on the formation lap before lining up on the grid.

This procedure and the number of burnouts are determined by the teams based on the track and the ambient temperature conditions, which is always a tricky thing to get right at Zandvoort. Priestley believes that McLaren was not able to judge their start procedures correctly which ultimately affected both the drivers.

McLaren possibly missed on a 1-2 finish due to their poor start

While it is tricky to get the procedure right in Zandvoort where conditions are changing a lot, Priestley noted that none of the other teams got it wrong. That is why, he thinks that race starts are a weakness that the Woking-based team needs to improve upon.

While Norris was able to recover the race lead from Verstappen, it was a different story for his teammate Oscar Piastri. The Aussie got stuck behind the Mercedes of George Russell at the start and later behind the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc on his way to a fourth-place finish.

Priestley believes that if both the McLarens had gotten a clean getaway at the start, Piastri could have easily finished in second behind Norris making it the second 1-2 finish for the team since the Hungarian GP. That would also have helped Norris reduce Verstappen’s lead in the drivers’ championship by three more points.