McLaren team boss Andrea Stella admits that despite a dominant win for Lando Norris at Zandvoort the MCL38’s performance is still “not enough” to ensure that it’s the best car at every circuit.
Stella promised that more upgrades are on the way as the team continues to take the fight to rivals Red Bull.
Norris scored a comfortable win in the Netherlands, despite losing out to Verstappen at the start, and having to pass him for the lead.
However Stella cautioned that the Dutch track was particularly favourable to the car.
“I have to say today is very encouraging from a performance point of view,” said the Italian.
“At the same time it happens at a track that seems to be just very suitable for our car, like Hungary was.
“Even after Hungary, we said, ‘Ah it’s going to be P1, P2 every race.’ But it’s not. It just seems to be very track dependent at the moment.
“But today was definitely beyond expectation, including yesterday, in terms of qualifying performance, in terms of race performance, and to some extent, even the tyre degradation was very good, to the point that Lando scored the fastest lap of the race at the last lap.”
Stella admits that it’s hard to judge how cars will compare at different types of tracks, but he expects Red Bull to still be the pacesetter at some venues.
“I’m not so sure in terms of relative competitiveness,” he said. “I think if we go to tracks which belong to this kind of family of tracks, then I think we can be confident that we will perform strongly – like high downforce, long corners.
“If we go to tracks where you have very high-speed corners, like in Silverstone, then we know Red Bull, they are very strong in this kind of layout. And still, I think if you go back to Austria, they will be faster, because in Austria, they pulled off like a four-tenths advantage in qualifying.
“But I think thanks to the upgrades now, we will be more competitive even where Red Bull were faster than us, potentially.
“It’s not easy to see. I think it’s in a way, we miss the opportunity to see in Belgium, who would have been the fastest car in dry condition because of the qualifying intermediate tyres.
“But we think that the car in the current configuration is possibly not enough in terms of the performance required to be the best car at every single event. That’s why we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season.”
Stella said that the team realised early in the Zandvoort race that Norris had the pace with which to pass Verstappen on track, rather than via pit strategy.
“It must have been around a few laps before the overtaking where Max’s pace started to drop off compared to Lando,” he said.
“And looking at Lando’s data, he still seemed to be pretty comfortable, like he could be fast without having to abuse car balance, or abuse the tyres.
“It became apparent that with this kind of pace, we could have overtaken, even because Max was on a Monaco rear wing, and we were on a relatively smaller rear wing.
“So we knew that if we got into potentially what was half a second or something, we could have gained massively down the straight. At some stage it became apparent let’s not think about undercutting, because I think this situation will sort itself naturally with an overtaking.”
Adam Cooper F1 