Successive races compromised by botched pit stops leave McLaren with vital work to do.

Let's face it, in Monza and again in Baku, Lando Norris's stops were hardly stellar - sorry - and in both cases cost the team.

In Italy, an issue with the left-front led to the controversial decision to order Oscar Piastri to give back the position he'd inherited at the Briton's expense, while an errant front-right wheel nut meant Norris failed to get the jump on Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda costing him vital championship points.

This was all the more damaging for it meant Norris was unable to fully capitalise on teammate Oscar Piastri's first lap retirement.

"Definitely in terms of pit stops, that's an area in which we have already concentrated our efforts," McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said after the race.

"We need to keep working because there's some important performance that is available through pit stops," admits Stella. "And we have seen that the racing, if anything, is getting tighter and tighter.

"So what is the impact of a pit stop now gets more and more important," he adds.

"Definitely for the remainder of the season and also thinking about next year's car, there's work to do from a pit stop point of view, for what is the execution of the pit stop," the Italian concedes, "but also the hardware such that executing a pit stop for our crew is just more straightforward and more natural. There's still some interactions between the operator and the hardware that should be improved from a hardware point of view."

Keen to make clear that the two incidents were not related, Stella nonetheless insists that pit stops are an area where his team must improve.

"They were different," he says. "This one was definitely more to do with the interaction between the operator and the gunning. But we know that from a hardware point of view, we are not optimising.

"This is not because we didn't want to, this is because you kind of learn on the way. And we know that there's room for improvement in terms of the equipment, in terms of the hardware on the equipment and the car side, so that we can make the life a little bit easier for our pit crew."