"who are you most proud to be next to on the championship trophy? who are your heroes"

lando arrives for race day!

Before I decided to mathematically determine whether there's a special helmet curse, a bunch of us nerds over on the McLaren Discord decided to figure out if Lando and Oscar really did better in white race suits. You can actually blame the disaster that was the sprint race in Austin last year for all of this, as this is basically how we were coping.

Since McLaren have revealed their special suits and livery for Silverstone this year (which tickle the amateur historian in me so much), I figure it's a good time to share the figures for the white suit!

This should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt since the sample size is very small, but that's also why I get extra excited whenever there's a special race suit because that means that the sample size is growing!

Since the 2023 season, McLaren have raced in a white suit 6 times (Silverstone will be the 7th). In white, Lando finishes with an average place of 2.61, and Oscar finishes with an average place of 4.78, making for a team average finish of 3.69 in a white suit.

Compared to the standard papaya suit, Lando finishes 4.09 places higher in white, and Oscar finishes 3.03 places higher.

Oscar technically does a little better in a black suit than a white suit, finishing 0.78 places higher in black than he does in white, making black the best performing color for Oscar (not counting the one-off yellow suit from Monaco 2024 were he finished P2).

Prior to his DNF in Monaco this year, black had also been the best performing color for Lando, but white now outperforms black by 2.39 places.

(Sorry it's so tiny...click to embiggen)

For now, I've only done the calculations on the finishing place comparison, as the race completion comparison was a new metric that I added when I did the helmet analysis, and I haven't applied it to the suit color spreadsheet yet because I need to add some additional data and conditional formatting that I just haven't been feeling lately. I'll also correlate the two at some point, but again, who knows when. I do want to know these things, though.

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)