McLaren took until the final round of last season to clinch the constructors’ championship but are on course to do so much earlier this year.
Lando Norris’s victory in the Monaco Grand Prix last weekend gave the team its sixth grand prix victory of the eight rounds so far this season. He and team mate Oscar Piastri have each finished on the podium in all but one of the opening rounds.
That has propelled the team to a total of 319 points, more than double that of closest rivals Mercedes, with 147. With one-third of the season complete, if teams continue to score point at the current rate, McLaren would clinch the title with seven of the 24 rounds remaining – 29.1% of the season.
The last team to win the title at such an early stage in the season was also McLaren, during one of the most dominant performances ever by a team. They clinched the 1988 title with five of the 16 rounds remaining.
*Projection based on current scoring rate
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This was the celebrated season in which the team’s drivers, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, came within one race of winning every single round. They were only beaten at Monza, where Prost’s engine failed and Senna tangled with the lapped Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser two laps from victory.
The MP4/4 chassis and turbocharged 1.6-litre Honda engine is widely regarded as one of the most dominant F1 cars ever. Senna and Prost routinely lapped multiple seconds faster than their rivals in qualifying. When Senna took pole position for the team in the second round at Imola the team’s quickest rivals, Lotus, were 3.352 seconds slower.
No other team has won a championship so emphatically in the 37 years since then. Ferrari won the 2001 and 2002 titles with four out of 17 rounds to spare and the 2004 championship with five out of 18 remaining. Mercedes’ most dominant win came in 2015, when they won the title with four out of 19 races remaining.
McLaren’s performance advantage in pure lap time is far smaller this year than it was in 1988. Norris scored one of their most emphatic pole positions last weekend when he beat Charles Leclerc by 0.109 seconds; the gap has typically been a matter of hundredths and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has beaten McLaren’s drivers to pole in three out of eight rounds so far.
Part of the reason McLaren are pulling ahead so quickly is their rival constructors have been closely matched so far. Just five points separate Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.
Nor are all those teams’ drivers scoring points as successfully as McLaren’s. The Ferrari drivers have a roughly equal points share but Mercedes’ George Russell has more than twice as many points as rookie team mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
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The situation is even more extreme at Red Bull. Verstappen has scored 136 of their 143 points; his original team mate Liam Lawson was dropped after two point-less rounds and his replacement Yuki Tsunoda has contributed the rest.
As a result, while McLaren are heading for one of the most dominant title wins in decades, their drivers’ title fight could go down to the final round. Piastri leads Norris by just three points.
However with such fine margins separating the teams’ lap times, the competitive picture could still alter drastically over the remaining races. The effect of this weekend’s change in the front wing regulations remains to be seen.
Just like in 1988, McLaren are enjoying their success in the final year before new engine regulations arrive. How soon they, Red Bull and the rest halt development work on their current chassis to prioritise next year will also have a significant bearing on how early the constructors’ title is decided and whether Verstappen, just 25 points off the lead, can stay close enough to the duelling McLaren drivers to sustain his hopes of a fifth consecutive title win.
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