Stella pinpoints "the rate of progress" as McLaren's main strength
On the back of an utterly dominant showing in the first fourteen races of the season, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella has pinpointed "the rate of progress" as McLaren's main strength.
McLaren looked utterly dominant across the practice sessions last time out at the Hungarian Grand Prix, but a sudden change to the weather conditions meant that they were unexpectedly challenged by several rivals.
In the end, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc got the better of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, but a second and third spot on the grid were still strong starting places for the Woking-based outfit.
At the start, Piastri held on to second place, but Norris fell behind the Mercedes of George Russell and the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso.
With a one-stop strategy for Norris and fading pace for Leclerc, the McLaren pair worked its way up into the lead.
The closing stages saw Piastri close in on his team-mate on his fresher tyres, and the Australian mounted a several attacks, Norris held on to secure a one-two for the British outfit.
Asked to assess his outfit's performance across the opening stages of the current season, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella has pinpointed "the rate of progress" as McLaren's main strength.
"Well, it's always difficult to compare across seasons. In this case, we are comparing across teams, and even myself, I was in a very different role, so my field of view, my perspective was very different.
"But if I had to pick a couple of features of the journey that is happening here at McLaren, I would say the rate of progress that we have had in a couple of years is in itself pretty unique, and possibly the rate of progress itself was even faster than what we experienced at Ferrari in the very competitive times.
"The second one is that there are no superstars. It's like a proper team journey, and this includes even the drivers. So, I would say these are the two main features that are peculiar of the journey that we are having at McLaren right now.
Pressed on to reveal whether he has been surprised by McLaren's domination this year, Stella conceded that he did not have such expectations ahead of the season.
"I've been surprised by this level of competitiveness. When last year we discussed how much effort we wanted to put in improving the 2024 car, we definitely wanted to be very ambitious.
"We wanted to try and clear the “going into race weekends and you never know who's going to win” situation we had last year, and we thought we needed to do a little bit more than the normal development. So how do we do that? We embraced a very aggressive approach to innovation.
"The MCL39 is a very innovative car. From an engineering point of view, we've been nervous as to whether some solutions whether we were actually in the condition to deliver them. But then when we looked at the lap times and the numbers in simulations, actually, we thought that wouldn't be enough.
While McLaren used to introduce its developments as an extensive upgrade package, the Woking-based outfit has changed its approach, brining new parts to its MCL39 on a regular basis.
"At the start of the season, effectively it wasn’t enough. So, there's a factor that has happened during this season, which is the car has actually been upgraded. I think it was more noticeable in the past because we were coming with one-off upgrades, and they were in themselves very noticeable.
"But actually, even if we consider the last three, four races, there's been quite a lot of new parts that have been added. If we add all these in a single incidence, then we would say, “Oh, McLaren has a big upgrade.”
"So, I think this has helped a lot in creating this trend and finding that in the last three races, we were definitely very competitive," Stella concluded.
