While Lando Norris recovered from a poor getaway to win Formula 1’s Dutch Grand Prix, McLaren is under no illusions that it needs to get on top of its starts.
Even at Zandvoort, a similarly bad launch for Oscar Piastri dropped him behind George Russell and into the dirty air that would eventually rob him of a podium chance – and an opportunity to get in front of Max Verstappen.
As McLaren boss Andrea Stella said: “With Oscar, if we had not lost the position, I think it would be a different race.
“He had the pace to beat Max. So it's a significant missed opportunity, I would say.”
He added: “There's a wider theme around the performance of the launches, and this is certainly a priority for the future at McLaren.”
The start troubles in the Dutch GP come in the wake of a run of issues that Norris in particular has faced this season – which have proved costly in the fight for wins against Red Bull and Verstappen.
At the Spanish Grand Prix, Norris made a good initial getaway from pole position but a touch of wheelspin in what is known as the second phase of acceleration was just enough to help Verstappen get alongside on the inside.
At the Hungarian Grand Prix, it was almost an identical scenario with Piastri alongside him. Norris made a good initial launch but again, in the second phase, lost momentum and that allowed his team-mate to get inside him at Turn 1.
The hat-trick of poor starts from pole was completed in Zandvoort when both Norris and Piastri lost out with wheelspin to allow other cars to get ahead of them.
While the run of form has led many to point fingers that it is all down to Norris being unable to get his starts sorted, McLaren's double whammy at Zandvoort has perhaps served to highlight how teams have just as big a role to play in maximising getaways – because there are a lot of complex technical factors at play.
In the hands of drivers, but teams have a key role to play
The days of drivers having what was in effect a launch control system - where they just released the clutch and electronics took over everything else to control wheelspin - have long gone.
The FIA has made several moves over the past decade to ensure there is a greater driver influence over starts, rather than engineers being kings.
Nowadays, there are strict definitions for how clutches – and even clutch paddles – can be mapped and arranged to ensure that starts are in the hands of the drivers.
Along with making pull-type paddle-activated clutches mandatory for each driver, the clutch signals used by the standard ECU are heavily monitored by the FIA to limit any advantageous mapping.
Should a team wish to use two clutch paddles on the steering wheel, each paddle must now be identical in form, motion and mapping - and drivers may be asked to demonstrate that both paddles work identically.
There are also bans on teams placing any reference points near the clutch paddles to help drivers find consistency in where they position it - with a 50mm exclusion zone.
Furthermore, the paddle must work linearly with the clutch - meaning that the drivers’ actions must be wholly representative of the engagement of the clutch. That means no scope for clever clutch mapping to give a wide bite point as happened prior to 2017.
As Kevin Magnussen once said of how it was in the past: “You just had to release it between 10 percent and 80 percent.
"Somewhere in there was a flat map that would be set to the grip, the tyres and fuel loads. So the start was 100 percent up to the engineers before. But now it is completely down to us."
Key to getting the best getaway is in nailing the three separate elements of the start.
These are the initial getaway phase where, from having the clutch fully engaged and the rev as a pre-determined level, the driver reacts to the lights going out to hit the bite point that gets the car moving.
Then there is the second phase element where the clutch is steadily released further as the car accelerates – but not too quickly so that it spins up the wheels or too slowly and the car bogs down. Just millimetres of difference here in the release of the clutch paddle can cost you track position.
Then there is the final acceleration phase where the clutch has been released fully and the driver has to maximise his rate of acceleration and his gear changes.
Analysis of Norris’s start problems has shown them typically to go wrong in the second phase. That means the initial getaway and reaction is good, but the transition to the final acceleration element is where things go wrong.
This seemed to be the case last weekend too. At Zandvoort, according to FOM’s official data, both Norris and Verstappen had a reaction time of 0.28 seconds to the lights going out.
However, when it came to getting up to 200km/h, Verstappen did it in 5.23 seconds while it took Norris 5.64 seconds as the result of his wheelspin.
Working out where things go wrong is not so easy though because, as Stella revealed last weekend, sometimes a misstep in one phase can trigger consequences in later ones.
“I recall that in Hungary, the first two seconds were done probably when there was a bit too much wheelspin,” he said. “Therefore the shift was downgraded and he was slow, and therefore you lose the momentum.
“So it was a combination between the car status with wheelspin, the fact that the driver could have controlled wheelspin better, but also our settings probably they weren’t the best for that condition.”
Nailing the perfect start
While too much wheelspin is a theme of the McLaren getaways, it is too simplistic to say that the solution is simply for Norris to go a bit easier on the accelerator – for it is not just the throttle level that has to be perfect to ensure no wheelspin.
There are a host of factors at play when it comes to the perfect getaway – including the manner of the clutch release, its bite point, its temperature and wear, the throttle level, torque characteristics of the engine, tyre temperatures and the level of grip being offered by the track.
These elements and their influence never stay the same, which means that what works for the circumstances of one race start will be no good for another one. Drivers and engineers are constantly trying to nail the sweet spot for what will work off the back of limited practice starts over a race weekend.
Speaking several years ago about why modern race starts go wrong, Valtteri Bottas offered some fascinating insight into the kind of variability there is every time a car is launched and all the things that can go wrong.
"Either you have not managed to get enough temperature in the rear tyres in the formation lap, then you have wheelspin, or the clutch can behave slightly differently in different temperatures,” he said.
"When you do the practice start on the formation lap it brings the temperature up, and then sometimes it can bite a bit more because of the temperature – so it depends on the clutch. It is not always behaving and it is not always behaving 100 percent consistently.
"Or you make a miscalculation yourself. You think you have less grip than you have actually have on the grid or more than you actually have.
"There are many things that can go wrong. You need to try to keep it simple. Feel the grip, analyse your formation lap, and have a guess how much you have grip on the start."
Finding a cure
Delivering better race start is ultimately about consistency. Teams need to learn from what went wrong in the past and use that knowledge to help them improve for the future. That is the process McLaren is going through right now.
There is also an element that the contrasts between good and bad starts get more extreme the further up the grid you are. So what would be a decent getaway in the middle of the pack may look very poor from pole position when it is compared to a well-oiled machine like Red Bull and Max Verstappen.
As Stella said: “Optimising the start is a process that you go through by constantly revising what you do any time you test the starts – like the starts you do on the grid, for instance, but also the starts we do at the previous events.
“It’s a combination of the drivers’ execution, but also what the engineers are in condition to support in terms of tyre preparation, clutch settings, throttle control.
“There’s lot that comes from the teamwork. And this is kind of a teamwork that goes through incremental improvements.
“It’s not like: ‘Oh, we have good settings, good start position – that’s it.’ You constantly review and try to improve. At some of the previous races, we left a little bit of performance behind, so there’s a few things that we need to adjust.”
