McLaren sporting director Sam Michael says the team still needs to improve its pit stop performance despite now being the fastest in the pit lane.
Jenson Button's second stop at Hockenheim last weekend was timed at just 2.4 seconds - the quickest so far this season, as McLaren continued to recover from a poor opening few races of the season in terms of stops. Michael, however, insists that the team still has problems and that it was focusing on minimising the reaction times to slow stops.
"We still have issues, the same as any team in the pit lane, but the guys have a really good margin now so that if they do a 3.1s stop it feels incredibly slow - and that's pretty much the stops that everyone else is doing," Michael said. "So they've got enough margin to lose seven or eight tenths and not be the quickest but still very competitive.
"You can still see variants, but our average during the stops, if you take out Lewis's stop for a puncture because that's always going to be slower, would still have been quite low, towards the low 3s. So we've still got lots of work to do and I think it will always happen. You've got so many humans involved in one process that's happening in such a short period of time so what you've got to look at is how you can minimise the recovery time so that when things go wrong they can recover in tenths rather than seconds. That's really what we're focused on now, to get consistency."
With Michael having previously said that a sub two-second stop was possible, he insists that it isn't a targeted time.
"We don't have any target or incentive to break records on pit stop times. They come through default because we work on the equipment to make them consistent and that's why they get the fast times. Then they get the confidence, they relax and they do it properly."
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