🏎️ F1 - McLaren's gear ratio dilemma

One of the less obvious differences between the Mercedes works team and its customer McLaren, lies in their gearbox ratios.

McLaren has opted for shorter gear ratios, improving acceleration at the expense of outright top speed. That helps explain why McLaren and Mercedes drivers have often been seen using different gears through the same corners this season.

Under Formula 1 regulations, gear ratios are selected before the start of the season based on each team's expected power unit characteristics and energy deployment strategy. Once homologated, they cannot simply be changed from race to race.

This is where the factory team enjoys a subtle but important advantage. As the power unit manufacturer, Mercedes has a much clearer understanding of how its engine and hybrid system will perform long before its customer teams, allowing it to optimise the gearbox ratios with greater confidence.

After the first nine races, McLaren's choice appears to have been less than ideal. The team must now decide whether to use one of the regulation's permitted joker options to revise its gear ratios—or accept the compromise and preserve both budget and development resources for future upgrades.

We took a deep dive into the Silverstone telemetry so you don't have to. Here are some of the most interesting findings.

Top speed at the end of the start/finish straight

Mercedes is the clear outlier here. While Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull all use 8th gear, Mercedes runs 7th gear, highlighting a different energy deployment strategy.

Minimum speed – Turn 4️

Ferrari is generally regarded as the benchmark in slow-speed corners thanks to its excellent mechanical balance. At Silverstone, however, Mercedes matched Ferrari almost exactly through Turn 4

Speed at the apex of T 9️

This comparison reveals another interesting contrast. McLaren, despite using the same Mercedes power unit, adopts a different approach by selecting 8th gear through Copse, reducing engine revs while carrying almost identical corner speed. It is another reminder that customer teams often extract performance through alternative deployment strategies.

Minimum speed – Turn 1️7️

Tyres are among the biggest performance differentiators in Formula 1. Supplied exclusively by Pirelli, they are also one of the sport's richest sources of engineering data.

Throughout every race weekend, teams must return a prescribed number of used tyres to Pirelli. The photos above, taken after Friday running in Barcelona earlier this season, show Pierre Gasly's used Alpine tyres on their way back to Pirelli.

As you can clearly see, the tyres are covered with a thick layer of rubber "marbles" picked up after drivers return to the pits. Before any analysis begins, mechanics carefully remove this pickup using heat guns, exposing the tyre's true working surface.

Only then can engineers begin their inspection. Every tyre is examined for signs of wear, overheating, graining, blistering and abnormal loading before those observations are correlated with telemetry data such as tyre temperatures, pressures and cornering loads.

The tyre itself also tells an important story. The shape and size of the contact patch reveal valuable information about suspension geometry, camber settings and the overall balance of the car.

One final detail: the yellow chalk marking on the sidewall identifies the tyre's position on the car—in this case, Pierre Gasly's left-rear tyre.

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