Monaco · QUICK TAKE
McLaren's Monaco Friday unravels with a stranded car and a safety-button fine
Norris stopped on track, Piastri over a second off the pace, and the stewards found tape over a mandatory safety button.
A year ago, Lando Norris took pole at Monaco and converted it into a win, with Oscar Piastri alongside him on the front row. Twelve months on, the same circuit feels like a different world for McLaren. Norris’s car stopped dead in FP2, Piastri spent both sessions well off the leading pace, and the stewards issued a penalty that is as embarrassing as it is expensive.
The weekend started poorly and kept getting worse. In FP1, Ferrari locked out the top of the order, with Norris already 1.3 seconds off the pace before his session ended early. Piastri fared even worse, sitting 1.5 seconds adrift. A Hulkenberg Audi split the two McLarens in the classification, which is not a sentence the team would have anticipated writing on the Friday of a Monaco weekend.
Then came FP2, and something altogether more serious. Norris’s car “just switched off,” as he put it afterwards, leaving him stranded on track. McLaren planned to break curfew Friday night to diagnose the failure, according to The Race. Piastri finished the session 7th, still more than a second from the front. Ferrari had led again, with Hamilton edging Leclerc by 0.111 seconds at the top. Verstappen was 3rd, 0.168 seconds off in FP2. McLaren was nowhere in that conversation.
The stewards’ finding added a layer the team will find harder to shake than a pace deficit. The verdict, reported by The Race, is blunt: McLaren had placed transparent tape over the clutch disengagement system button for aerodynamic reasons. The CDS is a mandatory safety device, required to be operational whenever a car comes to rest, so that marshals wearing protective gloves can quickly engage it and remove the car safely. The tape made pressing the button by hand impossible without a tool.
“The team admitted that for aerodynamic purposes, it had placed transparent tape over the button that is required to be pressed to activate the CDS. This, in the opinion of the FIA representatives and admitted by the team, completely defeated the purpose of the CDS system.”
That is the stewards’ verdict in their own words. The language is direct, and the admission is not contested. McLaren conceded the point; the only question before the panel was how hard to press on the penalty.
The context matters here. Racing Bulls had already been found in breach of the same regulation in Montreal, where a stricken car could not be removed because the CDS button served a dual purpose and could not be engaged immediately. The FIA and the stewards noted explicitly that the Montreal case should have put every team on notice. McLaren, it appears, had not acted on that signal.
The fine was accompanied by a partial suspension, but the stewards made clear the lesser suspended portion reflected the fact that McLaren’s tape issue was distinct in character from the Racing Bulls dual-purpose design, not that the breach was treated lightly. The decision to physically obstruct a marshal-facing safety control for an aerodynamic marginal gain is the kind of call that tends to draw scrutiny well beyond the penalty itself.
For the championship picture, Friday’s damage is real even before the points weekend begins. McLaren arrived in Monaco already under pressure after a difficult Canada. Ferrari, leading both practice sessions here by a comfortable margin, is well placed to extend its advantage in the constructors standings if Saturday follows the same pattern. Norris needs to understand what caused his car to stop before he can think about a qualifying lap. Piastri needs to find more than a second somewhere.
The 2025 Monaco pole and win show that McLaren can perform here. The circuit has also, in earlier years, been unkind: both drivers were outside the top 10 in qualifying in 2023, and Ricciardo qualified 14th the year before. Monaco has a way of separating a genuinely quick car from one that merely looks quick elsewhere.
What makes Friday harder to explain away is the layered nature of the problems. A mysterious power or electrical failure on Norris’s car, a pace gap that stretched to well over a second for both drivers across both sessions, and a stewards’ finding that required the team to admit a conscious aerodynamic choice had rendered a safety system inoperable. Each issue on its own is survivable. Together, they raise a sharper question about whether McLaren’s Monaco preparation went wrong earlier than Friday.
The team will work through curfew to find answers. There are answers to find: Norris has the speed to qualify near the front here and has shown it recently, and a single qualifying session at Monaco can reset a weekend that practice suggested was heading somewhere else entirely. But the tape admission is harder to fix than a power unit fault. That one will follow the team for a while.
McLaren arrived in Monaco as defending race winners; they leave Friday having been fined for taping over a safety button, with both cars a second off the pace and Norris’s car still undiagnosed.