Why McLaren is sliding backwards in British GP after surprise sprint podium

McLaren is back to reality at Silverstone after the false dawn of Lando Norris' Formula 1 sprint race podium

If Lando Norris' sprint podium at the Formula 1 British Grand Prix offered hopes that McLaren was in better shape than previously anticipated, those hopes were well and truly quashed in qualifying.

Norris claimed third in Saturday morning's 17-lap shootout after coming out on top of a three-way fight with George Russell and Max Verstappen, although there was clear daylight between the reigning world champion and frontrunners Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton's Ferrari.

Grand prix qualifying, which had given teams the opportunity to revisit their car set-ups, painted a more dramatic picture. McLaren, much like Red Bull, was nowhere, with Norris qualifying a distant sixth, 0.766s off pole. Oscar Piastri fared even worse in eighth, another tenth and a half adrift.

High-speed Silverstone is a circuit that brutally exposes weaknesses, whether from a power unit or from an aerodynamic efficiency point of view.

In McLaren's case, its main deficit is the latter, because that's an area where the team had previously admitted to being two to three months behind its rivals. Its lack of aerodynamic load and efficiency was accentuated even more but the gusty conditions, according to team principal Andrea Stella.

"This is a circuit where we have a bit less grip overall than in Austria," he said. "The car slides a lot. It was not only windy, but it was gusty. And when you have these conditions, I think there's a premium for the cars that have the best behaviour and grip in the corners, so I'm not surprised that Ferrari and Mercedes opened up the gap to Red Bull and McLaren when the grip and conditions were more difficult.

Andrea Stella, McLaren

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Stella also stressed McLaren is still catching up to Mercedes regarding optimising the Mercedes HPP power unit. "It's a circuit where power unit exploitation and performance is particularly important and I have to say that we still seem to have a little bit of a deficit in extracting the most from the HPP power unit," Stella acknowledged.