McLaren won't solve its pit-stop problems until 2026 at the earliest.

      Over the course of the season Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris have repeatedly lost time and positions on track because of delays during pit stops. For example, at the previous round in Singapore the championship leader Piastri’s pit stop lasted 5.25 seconds because the mechanics were unable to change the rear-left wheel quickly.

      Lando Norris’s pit stop in Monza lasted 5.87 seconds, causing the British driver to lose a position to Piastri, and the team had to ask Oscar to let his teammate through.

      Team principal Andrea Stella said that the delays this season are linked to equipment characteristics, so the problem will not be fixed before 2026. Nevertheless, McLaren plans to take certain measures that will partly mitigate the problem in the short term.

      “We know that our equipment makes the operations of removing and refitting the wheel nuts somewhat more complicated than they should be,” Andrea Stella said. “We have identified the cause and will make adjustments that will mainly be implemented next year.

      At the same time we continue to work with the mechanics to eliminate some of the operational difficulties related to the equipment’s characteristics.

      At the factory the team is doing a lot of work to assess, adjust and test the equipment. It’s a holistic and fairly large-scale job. But I’m happy with how we are responding to the problem, fixing it and planning for the future.”

      Stella added that, on average over the season, neither driver in the team has an advantage over his teammate due to pit-stop speed: “During the review we saw that over the season the average pit-stop time for Lando and Oscar is almost identical. It’s just a coincidence that lately the problems have arisen with Lando. The data show that over the season neither of them gained an advantage [over their teammate].”

      According to calculations by The Race, Lando Norris’s average pit-stop time this season is 3.02 seconds, while Oscar Piastri’s is 2.97 seconds.