McLaren is aiming to bring its first major upgrade to its 2024 car in the first third of the season, according to team principal Andrea Stella. The team made clear when it launched its new car that there were still areas it was working on that would …
McLaren is aiming to bring its first major upgrade to its 2024 car in the first third of the season, according to team principal Andrea Stella.
The team made clear when it launched its new car that there were still areas it was working on that would only be ready after the season had started, and that the car’s development would be important in the early stages. Stella says McLaren is almost able to get the maximum performance out of the car in its current state already, and set the timeline for the update package for a window that runs up to the Monaco Grand Prix in late May.
“I think there is margin to understand the car a little bit more,” Stella said. “[In Jeddah] we had a slightly different approach to set-up between the two cars and I think this is interesting with positives and negatives, so you want to gain this knowledge and use it for the future.
“I mean, apart from this optimization which is maybe worth about 0.1s – you cannot find any magic because we have done the test for three days, the two race weekends have had no rain, so we have been on track for a long time.
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“I think we know the car well, apart from these little differences between the two cars that we will review, and I think it’s very much a matter of upgrades or the adaptation to the track in relation to the track characteristics. If you go to Suzuka, and you think Sector 1 is similar to Sector 1 [in Jeddah] and you think McLaren will be fast. So we expect Suzuka will be a good track for us.
“Otherwise it’s a battle of development, and there may be very visible developments where you come with an aerodynamic upgrade – which we will declare in the submissions and is very visible – or there are some other things that you can deliver from a mechanical or even aerodynamic point of view, and at the moment in the pipeline we have both.
“We have some minor things that will come for Australia and hopefully for Japan, but they will be a few milliseconds, and then hopefully within the first third of the season we will have a major upgrade.”
The Australian Grand Prix this weekend comes after the first non-race weekend of the season, but Stella says it is too early to commit to an upgrade package that is significant enough to justify the financial outlay.
“Delivering the upgrades nowadays, it doesn’t have very much to do with the logistics. The main challenge is do you bring upgrades to Sprint races or not? Because we have that in China or Miami for instance, where you only have Free Practice 1.
“But then you have another challenge which is the budget cap. You can’t put something into production as soon as you have something reasonable – you can’t do it like this because you would run out of budget. So you have to be convinced that this is going to be a good upgrade, and then you press the green button and you spend the money.
“And then the next reason why you don’t bring upgrades to Australia is it takes time to create a convincing package that is a significant step. We are very happy with our development rate – I think over the last 12 months we saw that our development rate kept the gradient – so we pressed the button for Austria last year, for Singapore, and then on the new car, and then it’s going to be for around race six or race seven.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Lando Norris stands among the world champions he has worked with in the past, including Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso. Stella worked with both Schumacher and Alonso at Ferrari – where he also worked …
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Lando Norris stands among the world champions he has worked with in the past, including Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso.
Stella worked with both Schumacher and Alonso at Ferrari – where he also worked with Kimi Raikkonen – and then spent further time alongside Alonso and Jenson Button at McLaren. Now team principal at the latter, Stella has overseen the decision to secure Norris’ future until at least the end of 2026, and says he has the ability to join those other names as a world champion.
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“Lando definitely stands together with them,” Stella said. “It’s the same category, same kind of world championship material, the underlying talent, the mindset, the work ethos, it’s all ready to go.
“At the same time when you think about champions there’s a characteristics of champions, it’s they only get better. Real champions, they seem to just improve year by year, and I think that’s the case because they use their intelligence, their ethos, they get the best people around them, they do whatever it takes to get better and better because the sport gets only more and more competitive.
“So definitely we have all the raw material, which we saw already, when Lando was doing the free practice one with us, it was very evident in 2018, then it kept growing. It’s there, we just need to keep growing year after year, which every champion does, but we are extremely happy and committed to Lando in this respect.”
Norris says the atmosphere and comfort he feels within McLaren has allowed him to develop to this stage of his career, and played a major role in him wanting to remain with the team regardless of potential interest from elsewhere.
“I definitely always wanted to be convinced McLaren is my future,” Norris said. “Of course we’ve gone through some harder years recently, and things definitely didn’t pick up as much as we were hoping, between 20, 21, 22, beginning of 23. But also, a lot has changed.
“There are always going to be little things going on backwards and forwards between people. But in terms of keeping my concentration where it needs to be, which is just on the driving and continuing to focus on that [McLaren is best] – and especially with how we turned things around last year, and with what we know we can still achieve and do with even more things coming our way in terms of personnel and infrastructure. There’s still things which are coming online, and just getting warmed up.
“Considering we were able to do what we did last year, considering it’s a team I have been with since the beginning, it’s a team I want to continue my story with in terms of reaching my goal of winning races, and winning championships. McLaren is a team I want to do it with.
“They are the ones who have brought me into F1, they have given me this opportunity so in some ways I feel like I also owe it to them, but I’m just very much part of the family and also very much enjoying where I am.
“That’s always a big part of it. I don’t want to enjoy another team and not enjoy anything. I’m part of the family, I’m excited to be part of that family – especially on the trajectory we are on – I think it’s been the most important factor in all of this.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says the impressive rate of development that the team showed last season has been continuing during the winter. The 2023 launch car was always spoken about with reservations, but McLaren stated it knew where it …
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says the impressive rate of development that the team showed last season has been continuing during the winter.
The 2023 launch car was always spoken about with reservations, but McLaren stated it knew where it was lacking and would be delivering improvements by midseason. After a stunning turnaround in form that saw multiple podiums, a sprint victory in Qatar and a recovery to fourth in the constructors’ championship last year, Stella says the 2024 car continues to follow the same trajectory.
“So far I have to say we don’t see the diminishing returns,” Stella said. “This obviously will have to be proven once we put the car on the ground, but when it comes to the wind tunnel development or CFD development we see that the gradient we established last year that led to the Austria development and then the Singapore development it seems we can maintain it.
“That’s where I would expect the launch car to be at the start of the season, and in the ground we are already starting to work on the farther developments that we hope to bring relatively soon in-season and they also seem to be quite interesting. So I would say in terms of the regulations themselves and the development we are having specifically at McLaren it seems like the kind of linear gradient of development can be maintained.”
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Stella says he has confidence in the continuation of McLaren’s personal performance improvements.
“For me in particular this started last year; definitely it’s important we put the team in condition and capacity to keep generating new ideas,” he said. “It could be there’s some areas of the car you realize maybe the investment here is not worthwhile, but so far, we have not found it.
“You look at the car — suspension, tires, aerodynamics — they all still have quite a lot to offer in these generation of regulations, so what we are looking at very carefully is to make sure we’re in condition to cash in these performance opportunities that do seem to be available.
“This is reflected in numbers, so we can’t fool ourselves — we need to see these numbers go up. Right now it’s what we seem to be finding in development, but it’s a slightly different story when it comes to competitiveness on track, as this depends on what the opposition has done.”
Red Bull is the obvious benchmark of that opposition, but Stella says measuring progress against the world champions is challenging because he expects a big step forward given the lack of development on last year’s RB19.
“When we think specifically about Red Bull, there’s one element that obviously I think puts everyone in doubt as to what’s going to happen in 2024 and it’s the fact they haven’t developed their car very much,” Stella said. “So have they cashed in, accumulated development that they will capitalize onto next year’s car? This is my theory — I can’t think that Red Bull were not in a condition to develop their car, they [just] might have decided not to deliver upgrades.
“It might be that their gradient kept going, so I would say Red Bull should be extremely competitive. We will see where we are, what kind of challenge we will be able to set on track. For us, it’s important to see that we are doing a good job on our own performance development and we are confident that if we keep doing this, over time, we have an opportunity to close the gap. That’s our vision for the future.”
McLaren still doesn’t believe it has the pace to hold off Max Verstappen if it leads a race, despite the performance of Lando Norris in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix. Norris took pole for the Sprint and finished second to Verstappen after losing out at …
McLaren still doesn’t believe it has the pace to hold off Max Verstappen if it leads a race, despite the performance of Lando Norris in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Norris took pole for the Sprint and finished second to Verstappen after losing out at the start, and then took the restart in Sunday’s race in P2, allowing him to attack early on. With Verstappen holding Norris off, the pair traded similar lap times throughout the race and Norris comfortably set the fastest lap after extending his middle stint, but after finishing eight seconds adrift of the race winner team principal Andrea Stella says tire usage remains the main differentiator and that holding the Red Bull at bay is still unlikely.
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“Hmmm, no, I think at the moment the difference is not in the dirty air, I think the difference is mainly, in terms of lap time, on used tires,” Stella said. “We have seen that on new tires we can fight for pole position, but as soon as the tires degrade it would appear Max, Red Bull, they can have just less degradation.
“Here the tires were degrading maybe one tenth every two laps, so it’s a significant amount of degradation – and if you can limit that, after 10 laps in a stint this is (five) tenths of a second. So I think this is where they are superior at the moment, and where we think the difference is made we can’t do very much with this car.
“The car has improved with the Singapore upgrade, in terms of tire management, but not enough to be able to compete – especially when degradation is high like (in Brazil). And we saw some cars degrading quite a lot, like Mercedes, Ferrari.”
But Stella admits there are no guarantees about how Verstappen would fare if he had to try and find a way past Norris, so McLaren went aggressive at Interlagos on Sunday to try and offer up a different challenge.
“Certainly in terms of our approach, especially after the red flag, we wanted to win it – so we put at the start our best set of softs, so we decided to start on a new set so that we could try to take the lead, and from there put Verstappen in an unusual position and see what we could do.
“We couldn’t take the lead at the launch, we got very close in doing that on-track, but after that our car is starting to overheat and we needed to make sure we achieve our target lap – because Alonso wasn’t that far, at that stage it seemed like he could stay with us, but certainly we tried hard in the first stint.
“I think after that, Verstappen once again he had enough lead to actually manage the situation. Any time we tried to get a little closer, there were a few laps in the second stint were it seemed like we could do, then he put together a couple of mega laps. After the first stint there wasn’t very much we could do.”
Lando Norris’ recovery to fifth place in the Mexico City Grand Prix was one of the best races that McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has ever seen. A scrappy Q1 led to Norris being eliminated in that first part of qualifying and facing a tough …
Lando Norris’ recovery to fifth place in the Mexico City Grand Prix was one of the best races that McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has ever seen.
A scrappy Q1 led to Norris being eliminated in that first part of qualifying and facing a tough race on a track that is tough to overtake on given the cooling requirements the cars face at altitude. Despite Norris having to take the red flag restart in 10th and dropping to 14th, he then fought through to an impressive fifth with multiple eye-catching overtakes.
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“We were having exactly this conversation on the pit wall as his race engineer Will Joseph turned to me and said to me ‘that’s one of the best of Lando’,” Stella said. “I said, ‘Will, that’s one of the best at all’.
“Overtaking, so many overtakes, in Mexico, where (on Saturday) if you read the quotes everyone is saying it’s so difficult to overtake, while managing PU temperatures, having to do lift and cost. I’m just impressed. One of the best races for a driver that I’ve been part of.”
Given the fact Stella has worked with both Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, it was high praise from the Italian.
“Yeah, this race made me think of Valencia 2012, where at the time we started 12th (with Alonso), we won the race. But this one… on one side we are excited, having seen this kind of masterpiece, on the other side like Lando said on the in-lap, ‘guys let’s do a good job on Saturday and we can fight for podiums’, so the pace was there to fight for podiums.”
Despite the impressive Sunday recovery, Stella admits the run of form McLaren has been on means the outright pace suggests an opportunity for another top three result was missed.
“That’s what I’m trying to say, there’s a little element of frustration, but at the same time if you asked me (after qualifying) I would not have thought we could overtake so many cars.
“So I’d rather take the positives out of this race and I hope that the entire team at the factory and the fans receive the same sort of message: we are there, we don’t give up, we are competitive, but we need to do a better job overall the whole race weekend.”
Aston Martin’s slide from competitiveness at the front of the field is being used as a warning against complacency by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. Mike Krack’s team achieved a huge step forward over the winter to start this season as the …
Aston Martin’s slide from competitiveness at the front of the field is being used as a warning against complacency by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella.
Mike Krack’s team achieved a huge step forward over the winter to start this season as the nearest challenger to Red Bull, with Fernando Alonso scoring six podiums in the opening eight races. With 154 points scored in that time, Aston has only picked up 67 in total since, a run coinciding with McLaren’s recovery that has seen Stella’s team closing in quickly in the constructors’ standings.
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But Stella said he was “very mindful” of how McLaren’s form can fall away too.
“If anything we are trying to be as rigorous as possible from a development point of view to ensure that we are not short cutting any steps,” he said. “We don’t get too like ‘We need to develop faster’ and then you start to skip some methodical steps that we have applied so far.
“But I think everyone at McLaren – especially the technical leadership – are very aware that the pace of development is already fast and that is what we need to keep pursuing. And then we will see once we are in Bahrain next year who has been able to develop faster.
“We saw with Aston Martin that over the winter big steps are possible. Or like with McLaren that you can do it even during the season.”
Lando Norris has finished second in each of the past two races and Oscar Piastri backed that up with his first podium in Japan, but Stella believes there are no realistic venues this season whereMcLaren can target beating Red Bull to victory.
“Still a step too far. In fairness, at the moment it looks like it’s Max (Verstappen) who is one step too far. There’s a variability of tracks left in the season, but none of these tracks has the Singapore characteristics.
“So while there could be some tracks where we could be competitive – I think Qatar should be a decent rack for us – I’m afraid that the characteristics we like are also the characteristics where Red Bull will be just outstanding. So we will have to be realistic that we will need some situations to happen to be able to make the final step.”
Whether such progress is possible over the winter before the 2024 season is another matter, with Stella saying the signs are promising for McLaren at this stage but he’s wary of other threats.
“At the moment we are encouraged by the development that we see on next year’s car. At the same time I guess that’s the same for everyone because right now some concepts are starting to be quite clear across the paddock, so we don’t know whether we are developing faster than other teams and above all we don’t know whether we are developing faster than Red Bull.
“But let’s not forget I think Mercedes realized what they need to work on and I suspect they are going to jump back quite strongly, so there’s no factual elements at this stage to say ‘this is the pecking order we will see next year’. I think things can evolve.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Oscar Piastri can only improve his race pace with experience and is showing all of the signs that he will develop quickly as a driver. Piastri scored his first podium at the Japanese Grand Prix but was …
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Oscar Piastri can only improve his race pace with experience and is showing all of the signs that he will develop quickly as a driver.
Piastri scored his first podium at the Japanese Grand Prix but was comfortably beaten to second place by teammate Lando Norris in a race of high tire degradation at Suzuka. The Australian stated he wasn’t fast enough in certain sections of the race and Stella says it’s natural for a rookie to need to experience such challenges to build up the knowledge required to handle tire-limited races.
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“I think when it comes to race pace, it’s not like you learn race pace and then it’s a set of skills that you deploy for every race,” Stella said.
“So I think that’s why it’s a bit of a journey and it takes time because every situation presents its own characteristics. I’m sure Oscar will have learned things and actually I think towards the end he was already better than he was in the second stint.
“It’s just systematic work of cashing in all the possible learning. There’s not one-off learning that is applicable to every situation, it’s just a rookie element.
“But the first thing I would take is always the outright speed, which is what we saw (in qualifying), because when you have that, race pace and all these things are much easier to work on. But finding the edge on a single lap in Suzuka like was saw is more difficult to sort of work together with your engineers, that’s a gift.”
The double podium result in Japan helped McLaren closed the gap to Aston Martin in the constructors’ championship to 49 points, but Stella says he doesn’t need to openly set the team a target of winning that battle.
“I don’t even want to think that there’s anybody at McLaren that needs this kind of carrot to push any harder, because I trust and I believe that everyone is pushing at the fastest reasonable sustainable pace. That’s what I want and that’s what I think is happening.
“If you start thinking of ‘We need to finish fourth’, everyone will say ‘Andrea, we know already, you don’t need to tell us, we don’t have to declare this to the world, we’re just going as fast as we can’. That’s the attitude.”
Oscar Piastri’s rookie season in Formula 1 has been consistently impressive to those on the outside, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella sees similarities with the likes of Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso in certain areas that points to …
Oscar Piastri’s rookie season in Formula 1 has been consistently impressive to those on the outside, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella sees similarities with the likes of Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso in certain areas that points to an even brighter future.
McLaren signed Piastri from Alpine in the middle of last season and had to go through a legal process to prove it had the contractual right to the highly rated Australian. A little over a year later after his arrival was confirmed, Piastri now has a fresh contract that runs through to the end of 2026, securing his long-term future after just 15 races.
For Stella, the success of Piastri is not unexpected given the amount of research into his abilities and potential McLaren committed to. The McLaren team boss offered high praise of some of the 22-year-old’s attributes that he likened to multiple world champions he has worked with.
“Obviously when McLaren so strongly wanted to sign Oscar, we looked at the results in the junior categories,” Stella said. “But what happened in the early days of the collaboration with Oscar is we could see that what he achieved in the junior categories had good reasons for that to happen.
“We could see this in the natural speed, which is related to the talent to some extent. We even saw it in the first day of the simulator in the way he was assessing his own performance, saying, ‘This is where I am. This is where I need to improve.’ It was matching so well with what we could see from the data. That was quite impressive.
“That’s where I thought, ‘It’s just a gift’ to some extent. His self-awareness in relation to speed, in relation to how to go and grab this speed opportunity — this became apparent at the tests and then race by race.
“Then we saw the qualities at the attitudinal level, and these qualities have to do with being able to continuously improve. You may be as talented as I’m saying, but I’m sure there are a lot of people that were talented but it didn’t lead anywhere because there was no attitude to continuous improvements.
“I think we have really good examples now on the grid of drivers that can keep being extremely competitive because of continuous improvements. I think this one is a similarity with Fernando (Alonso).
“Then we have the person behind the driver. For us it was important to make sure that the person that we keep on board is a person that not only fits our culture but will contribute to establishing the culture even more and potentially adding to the culture — adding to the values and the behaviors that make us become a team of mates.
“And in this sense Oscar, I have to say, from just a personal point of view, if he wasn’t a Formula 1 driver, I would appreciate him as a person. The values he brings into the sport and the values he brings into the collaboration with the team in this sense makes me think about Michael (Schumacher).
“Somebody who worked with Michael here in the paddock — he is at another team — said to me he was so capable of building families. He was definitely tough on track, but within the team, the spirit, the sense of unity was like a family.
“So I think I’m referring to natural talent, attitude culture and values. These three things became apparent to us relatively soon, and that’s why the conversations started soon.”
Those conversations were not about a simple contract extension, Stella says, but a new deal that reflects the faith McLaren has in Piastri as a future championship contender.
“It is a new contract because it became very apparent for us that we wanted to secure this prospect and we wanted to realize the full extent of the collaboration,” Stella emphasized. “It came at the point in which it was very apparent for us that Oscar is the right driver for McLaren, because of many, many reasons. I would like to say that this has been clear to us very early.
“The announcement comes now but actually the agreement was found pretty early on because what we needed to assess became clear and apparent to us very soon. I’m happy to say that the same was on Oscar’s side. It was a recognized by both parties that this is the collaboration that should lead both parties — from a team point of view and from a driver point of view — into the future.”
It’s not just from a driving point of view that Piastri has impressed McLaren either, with his approach and demeanor proving the perfect fit and helping create an atmosphere that Stella says is important to allow the team to perform at its best.
“There’s one attribute of his personality that we all appreciate and that when you are in a pressurized environment like Formula 1 becomes very important: he is a calm, considerate person,” Stella noted. “He doesn’t have nervous reactions. He doesn’t have unnecessary irritation. He doesn’t have tension in his comments.
“His comments are a genuine report of what happens with the car or of what happens in a situation that wasn’t ideal — you know you can trust what he’s saying. He’s not speculatively adding anything because he needs to promote himself. He’s trustworthy and calm.
“To be honest, calmness is a quality I generally try to strengthen as much as possible throughout the team because otherwise you can become — like I say, there are already enough reasons to be tense for the competition itself. Nobody should create additional (tension) just through behaviors or the way you speak to your colleagues or the way you report things.
“So he is calm. He is very considerate with his words. He is very considered with the way he presents himself and he’s somebody you know you can trust.”
Stella (middle) says Piastri’s natural acceptance of the role of team player alongside teammate Lando Norris is as valuable to McLaren as his speed. Steven Tee/Motorsport Images
Stella cites Piastri’s ready acceptance of McLaren’s decision to try out upgrades on Lando Norris’s car first as another example of the Australian being able to put the team’s long-term prospects ahead of his own short-term ones
“Twice this year we had a situation where we needed to make a call: who do we give the new upgrades? Both times they went to Lando because we thought that’s the best thing for the team, which is the only perspective to decisions that we adopt in our team,” Stella said. “Like in Singapore, for instance — new track for Oscar, very tricky track. Do you really want to give him the concern in free practice one? It could be wet, and this decision needed to be made weeks before because we needed to change the chassis at the factory. But let’s leave Oscar alone. He builds up through the weekend, and he managed from 17 to finish seventh thanks to that.
“In both times the conversations with Oscar were calm, rational and constructive where it was easy for me to say, ‘I’m talking in the name of the team’ and it was easy for him to understand that. Even if as a driver you always want to have the highest potential package, it definitely prevailed in his rational team-player approach to this conversation.
“At no point during the Singapore weekend did we have any annoyance, any comment like, ‘I’m a little slower here but obviously the other one has the new parts.’ Not even indirectly. And this means that everyone listening, everyone looking at the person, gets (shown) something by example.
“That’s the fit with the culture. Leaders — and drivers are definitely leaders in a Formula 1 team — lead by example, and Oscar you can trust is going to do it even when he is at a disadvantage.”
McLaren’s expectation is to fight regularly for podiums in 2024 and for victories a year later despite recent steps forward in car performance, according to team principal Andrea Stella. The strong showing at Silverstone has raised expectations …
McLaren’s expectation is to fight regularly for podiums in 2024 and for victories a year later despite recent steps forward in car performance, according to team principal Andrea Stella.
The strong showing at Silverstone has raised expectations around McLaren as the team made a major lap time gain over the past two races thanks to an upgrade package that will see further additions in Hungary this weekend. However, Stella says the team’s aims are not going to change instantly as a result, with the main lesson from the latest update being that it shows McLaren is doing the right things at the moment.
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“While you can have targets as an element of discussion, it doesn’t necessarily change our approach,” Stella said. “Our approach was always going to be to push as hard as possible with development, but with a logic and clear direction and then we will see where we end up.
“Once we started to develop the car we saw that the rate of development meant or reasonable expectation was that by the end of the season we could have fought with the four quickest teams. That’s what we thought was possible, so it is in a way a bit of a surprise that we find ourselves in this position now, but we will see how things unfold later.
“Our expectation is for McLaren to compete for podiums in the future, next season, and for victories in the following season. This is the long-term vision, but you don’t deliver based on visions, you deliver based on the facts that you actually bring to the car and that’s our focus.”
And Stella believes it is better for McLaren to be fully invested on where its next step is going to come from, rather than letting that ultimate aim of winning races again become a distraction.
“By nature I don’t necessarily think about the destination, I think about what do we need to put in place to keep improving. The way we discuss it internally is to let the results come to us. We just have to focus on what do we need to do on a technical level, at sporting level, financial level, that is our mindset.
“So if we take the technical level and performance, we just have to keep delivering upgrades to the car. Then sometimes you find surprises, like these upgrades that we took to Austria and (Silverstone), numerically we weren’t expecting this improvement from a lap time point of view.
“So we remain focused on delivering upgrades to the car, which means designing them, conceiving them, producing them and logistics and so on. Then we will see later on where we are in the journey.”
