Drivers’ Championship<\/a> \u2013 with the duo sharing 11 of the 14 Grand Prix victories in 2025 \u2013 and just nine points separate them at the summit of the standings.<\/p>\nWith 10 rounds left to go following the August break, Piastri and Norris look set to be involved in a two-horse race for the title with Stella conceding he was himself surprised at how much the papaya squad had been dominating races in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve been surprised by this level of competitiveness,” said the Italian, speaking during the Team Principals press conference at the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend. “When last year we discussed how much effort we wanted to put in improving the 2024 car, we definitely wanted to be very ambitious.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo how do we do that? We embraced a very aggressive approach to innovation. The MCL39 is a very innovative car.<\/p>\n
“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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stella went to explain how much of an impact McLaren’s recent upgrades have had in the last few races before the summer break, appearing to make the squad even more competitive.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the start of the season, effectively it wasn\u2019t enough,” he explained. “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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
McLaren’s Team Principal also highlighted the progress made in the run up to the 2025 season, and that it\u2019s hard to compare to his previously successful seasons with Ferrari \u2013 where he worked as Performance Engineer for Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen, before moving to become race engineer for the Finn and later Fernando Alonso.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s always difficult to compare across seasons,” Stella said. “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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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 to the journey that we are having at McLaren right now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Team Principal Andrea Stella has praised the efforts of everyone within McLaren, admitting he has been surprised by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-77629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}