Why Brazilian GP victory flattered McLaren upgrades

McLaren boss Andrea Stella has suggested that cooler track temperatures were a bigger factor behind Lando Norris’ win in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix than the team’s upgrades.

Norris converted pole position with a near-faultless performance in changeable conditions at Interlagos to take his and McLaren’s third victory of the 2026 season.

McLaren cautious over gain from Brazilian GP upgrades

In the process, the Briton ended the Woking-based squad’s five-race run without a podium on a weekend which coincided with the team introducing several new parts.

Despite acknowledging that the updates, which included a revised front wing, had delivered the anticipated improvement, Stella conceded Norris’ run to pole owed more to the wet conditions and the Briton’s expertise in the rain than tweaks to the MCL40.

“Conditions were certainly difficult, and I think we saw a little bit of a swing of our performance today, which is quite interesting,” Stella had said post-qualifying.

“In Q1, with the wet conditions, like a lot of water on track, we seem to be relatively comfortable. Lap times were coming easily. Lando and Oscar [Piastri] were competitive. Lando obviously was the fastest at the end.

“In Q2, with less water on track, we were struggling more. And even for Lando, it was difficult. And we saw that this caught out Oscar.

“Even if on Oscar’s side, I have to say that we had, first of all, the bad luck with the red flag. [But] we were also having some anomalies in braking, especially in terms of causing a lot of rear locking, which put off Oscar and gave him a wrong indication of the grip available. This is something that we need to look at from a car point of view.

“And then in Q3, more water, and once again we were more competitive.

“So I think today was more about the conditions and the car matching each other rather than the upgrades. It improved by pretty much the lap time that we thought was expected by the upgrades, but we saw this more in, if anything, in dry conditions rather than in wet.”

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Stella doubled down on that assessment post-race, despite having seen Norris pull away once the track had dried and the drivers had switched to slicks during the race.

The Italian highlighted that the track temperature still remained cooler than it had been on Friday, when McLaren had trailed Mercedes on both short and long run pace.

“Yeah, my explanation of our performance in dry today is associated with the track and ambient temperature,” he reiterated.

“The conditions were very cold, much colder than we had in practice. In those conditions in practice, I think we saw that we were still tending to overheat the tyres.

“Today, somehow the conditions came our way, and we could keep the tyre temperature under control. I think that’s the main reason.

“We know that we have some work to do in terms of getting more consistent in long runs in hot conditions, and I think we were in a way helped.

“You could see also this well when, especially with Lando, when the track was getting greasy before switching onto intermediate tyres, Lando was just able to keep the lap times much better than anybody else, and I think our car is good from this point of view.”

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