Stella delivers McLaren MCL40 verdict as fix timeline revealed
Andrea Stella has delivered his assessment of the McLaren MCL40.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has admitted that the fundamental problems with the MCL40 cannot be fixed by this year’s upgrades.
The current McLaren has proved a tricky car to master, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri having to learn a new style of driving to extract its ultimate performance.
Andrea Stella admits ‘fundamental’ issues with McLaren MCL40
Having won the past two constructors’ championships, McLaren has slipped to third in the standings this season and is at risk of falling to fourth with a resurgent Red Bull.
That’s despite victories in the Hungarian and Dutch Grands Prix for Norris, and a competitive outing in Madrid.
Those performances gave rise to suggestions that McLaren had made a step forward, though both drivers have since continued to speak about the difficulty associated with pushing the car to the limit.
“The car needs quite a lot of effort to deliver lap time, and it requires a level of intensity in the driving input, which is much superior to last year,” Stella told PlanetF1.com and other accredited media in Singapore.
“This is something that took some time for the drivers to get comfortable – well, comfortable is wrong, but to get to understand.
“It’s also one of the reasons why Oscar, at some stage he almost lost like some of the competitiveness compared to Lando.
“We were here discussing like, what is happening with Oscar? And I’ve always said that that was a technical matter.
“With this car, all these things together, they don’t seem to happen very often, so it’s a lot of work for the drivers.”
McLaren has a suite of upgrades scheduled to arrive for the United States Grand Prix.
While it’s hoped they will move the team a step closer to the front, Stella warns that they won’t alter the car’s underlying DNA.
“I don’t expect that what’s coming to the car will improve this characteristic,” he warned.
“I think we need something more fundamental than simply adding some downforce to the car, like is happening in the coming races, without fundamentally changing some further aspect, which we are addressing longer term and at the earliest, I would say, with the MCL41 for 2027.”
Despite Norris’ successes earlier in the campaign, Stella pointed to the comparative struggles McLaren endured in Azerbaijan and Malaysia.
An upgrade package introduced in Baku, with the initial raising concerns that it had made the car slower.
It’s since proved that was not the case, but it highlights the challenges the team has faced in getting the best out of the MCL40.
“At least we were in condition to clarify that that’s not the case, which is an important question that we were able to answer,” Stella said of the progress the team made in Singapore.
“We understand that it had to do with the track roughness, and Baku, in which we think that the power unit optimisation played a significant role in terms of lap time, and we know that this is not only power unit optimisation.
“There’s a few more things on the chassis side that, in the long straights, penalise McLaren in the current configuration, like the ratios.
“We had the doubts for a couple of races, but we welcome the fact that we were able here to clarify that there’s nothing wrong.”
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Stella added that Norris’ wins flattered the car, reasoning that McLaren has never held a significant advantage while highlighting that, once out front, clear air and the ability to control the race can exaggerate inherent strengths.
A points finish in Singapore, behind Red Bull, Mercedes, and by rights Ferrari, was in line with expectations for Stella, who suggests the competitive order is heavily influenced by the timing of upgrades.
“Verstappen and Red Bull, they are just taking advantage of the upgrades that they have delivered, and it’s what we call this season the ping pong,” Stella noted.
“Basically, people come with upgrades, even if, like in the case of Mercedes, I understand that they have some issues themselves, but people coming with upgrades, they can take a little step forward.
“And even if [in Singapore] Red Bull, they were kind of dominant, compared to us.
“They had three tenths of a second, and three tenths of a second is a range that you can add with an upgrade.”
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