McLaren's gamble on intermediate tyres unravelled in the Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday, leaving Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri out of the points in Montreal after the team had started both cars on the wrong side of a quickly changing track. The two McLaren drivers were the only drivers in the top 10 to begin the race on intermediates, and both had to pit early for slick tyres.
Light rain was falling in cold conditions before the start, and seven drivers fitted intermediate tyres for the race. Norris, who began from third, took the lead from the two Mercedes off the line, but his tyres began to overheat and he pitted at the end of the second lap. A problem for Racing Bulls' Arvid Lindblad triggered two extra formation laps and pushed the start back around seven minutes later than scheduled, which only made the timing harsher for those who had banked on the damp conditions lasting.
Piastri was blunt after the race, saying McLaren had made a mistake. He said it had been wet on the ground when the cars were sent to the grid and that the team would have looked like heroes if it had rained a little bit more, but because it stopped they looked like idiots. Norris and Piastri had already shown pace in Montreal, locking out the second row in Sprint Qualifying and Qualifying behind the dominant upgraded Mercedes, and Norris had even split the Mercedes in Saturday's Sprint before getting back into the points-paying positions on Sunday after switching to dry tyres.
Andrea Stella defended the call, saying the intermediate tyre was the right tyre at the time the decision had to be made because the track was greasy and the rain had not yet eased. He said the rain stopped pretty much after the five-minute signal and that the double extra formation lap added a clear penalty to starting on inters. McLaren had brought new parts to Canada but did not run its new front wing after testing it in Friday's only practice session, leaving the team to rely on a setup that had already shown promise but not enough margin for the race-day gamble to pay off.
For McLaren, the damage was immediate and clean: strong pace in qualifying and the Sprint, followed by a Sunday call that turned a front-running chance into nothing at all. The team read the track one way, the weather changed on them, and the result was a rare double zero in a race where the opening laps decided everything.
