McLaren came to Monaco with a defending winner in Lando Norris and a widespread expectation that they would be the team most likely to trouble Ferrari. Friday delivered the opposite — a day that left them looking like the weakest of the leading outfits.
It started to go wrong when Norris rolled to a halt at the Nouvelle Chicane in FP2. McLaren put the stoppage down to an electrical fault; the FIA, though, took an interest for another reason. As marshals tried to clear the car, its clutch-disengagement button failed to work, leaving it jammed in gear and prolonging the virtual safety car. The episode mirrored Liam Lawson's in Montreal, which brought Racing Bulls a 30,000-euro fine, and the stewards began looking into it.
The bigger worry for McLaren was not the lost laps. It was the speed, or the lack of it.
"I just didn't expect us to be so slow," Oscar Piastri told reporters in Monaco, via Autosport. He had banked the running Norris lost, but the lap time made no sense to him. "My feeling in FP2 was actually quite okay — I feel quite comfortable in the car, but it doesn't translate into lap time." Did he at least have a direction for setup overnight? "Not yet, not really."
The timing screens told the same story. Ferrari headed both sessions, Verstappen split the order in third, Mercedes lurked — and McLaren were a long way from any of it.
Peter Windsor's assessment was terse: a "terrible day for McLaren," built around Norris's stranded car and a session that never clicked. On the P1 podcast from Monaco, the surprise was obvious. "Their pace has just been surprisingly bad — really surprisingly bad," a host said. "I was convinced they were going to be probably the second best team behind Ferrari, and they've looked really slow." The blunt summary: "McLaren absolutely nowhere at the moment."
Norris, at least, drew sympathy for a year repeatedly spoiled by reliability. "Anytime he does actually have a faultless weekend, he's been phenomenal," the P1 hosts said — a backhanded reminder of how seldom that has happened.
McLaren maintain the gap can be closed. Engineering boss Rob Marshall said the team had "some ideas and we are confident that we can make it better." They will need them. At a venue where track position is almost everything and overtaking is a rumour, qualifying decides the weekend — and McLaren go into Saturday already behind.
