McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has revealed the secret to his team’s “surprise” level of dominance in Formula One this season.
With Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris the sole runners in a two-horse race for the drivers’ title, the McLaren duo have split 11 wins between them, with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen claiming victory twice and George Russell winning in Canada.
It means McLaren have all but won the constructors’ title already with 10 races left. Their lead at the top of the standings is a whopping 299 points over second-placed Ferrari.
Stella has been widely praised with turning around McLaren’s fortunes in the last two years, alongside chief designer Rob Marshall, and has spoken about how the papaya-clad outfit went “very aggressive” with their car approach this year.
“I've been surprised by this level of competitiveness," Stella said. "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 we were actually in the condition to deliver them [some solutions]. But then when we looked at the lap times and the numbers in simulations, actually, we thought that wouldn't be enough.”
Stella went on to explain that McLaren’s string of upgrades throughout the first half of the season has increased the gap to the chasing pack behind.
“There's a factor that has happened during this season, which is the car has actually been upgraded,” he said.
“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.”
F1 returns next week after the four-week summer break with the Dutch Grand Prix (31 August) in Zandvoort.
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