McLaren went its own way on the grid in Canada, and it paid for it. The team was the only front-running outfit to start the Grand Prix on intermediate tyres, a decision it later admitted was a mistake.
With pre-race drizzle having eased off, the doubts of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were obvious as early as the formation laps. By the time the field reached the grid, the call already looked wrong.
McLaren was open afterwards that it had erred, but was also adamant the decision needed to be judged on the information available at the time. With drizzle still in the air, the team felt that warming up slick tyres on the unknown quantity of the 2026 cars in the wet could have been a nightmare.
There was a mitigating factor. The roughly six-minute window between the original start time and when the race eventually got going, after Arvid Lindblad's stranded car was recovered, shifted the conditions much further towards slicks. Without that delay, McLaren mused, the whole picture might have been completely different.
Some of its rivals were quick to dismiss that defence, insisting they knew the moment the tyre blankets came off that McLaren had made a big blunder.
Norris, who eventually found some rhythm late in a compromised race, acknowledged the call had been a roll of the dice that did not come off as hoped.
"That was the first time in the weekend that things just started to feel more comfortable," Norris said. "What we did was a bit extreme, and it worked out quite well." He was left to reflect on what might have been, adding: "Points were definitely possible today."
Piastri's race unravelled in a different way. He lost grip and speared into Williams' Alex Albon, an incident for which he apologised, and which left McLaren with nothing to show from a weekend that had promised more. Norris was sympathetic to his team-mate.
"With Oscar, just unfortunate," Norris said. "I don't think he planned to do the overtake. He just got caught up with the track conditions."
It was a rare strategic misstep for a team that has more often been accused of being too cautious. In Canada, McLaren diverged from the pack and was punished for it, the kind of bold call that becomes a masterstroke when it works and a cautionary tale when it does not.
The lessons are clear, and McLaren will not want a repeat in Monaco, where track position is everything and there is precious little room to recover from a start gone wrong.
Source: youtube.com