McLaren disparages talk of team's F1 dominance as "out of place"

Andrea Stella says rival teams are engaging in gamesmanship amid speculation over McLaren car’s aero-elasticity

On a weekend where Formula 1’s future has dominated the news agenda, one matter of the here and now has cut through the noise: the degree to which the McLaren MCL39 is the dominant car and how the team has achieved this.

Despite Max Verstappen’s win at Suzuka last weekend against Red Bull’s run of form, McLaren remains the favourite this weekend even though Bahrain has been its bogey circuit in recent years. But team principal Andrea Stella pushed back against such assumptions, and even suggested that rival teams are exaggerating McLaren’s superiority for their own purposes.

“I think the margins are very small, they keep being small,” said Stella. “If we look in China in qualifying it was a bit of a mixed bag, Japan in qualifying we got beaten – and in the race we got beaten.

“So I think we have to be quite realistic as to the situation in terms of performance. I hear [people] sometimes talking about ‘dominance’, which I think is out of place.

“I hear the talk about dominance sometimes pronounced by our competitors. Clearly everyone knows their game, knows how to put pressure or how to attempt to put pressure on their rivals, but we’re very grounded people, we’re very calm.

“We’re not going to [take] this kind of bait. We know we have to work hard to exploit the potential of the MCL39 and we have to work hard to keep improving the car.”

Lando Norris, McLaren, Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images

Although Lewis Hamilton won the sprint race in China, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri won the grand prix from pole position – a week after Lando Norris won from pole in Australia. Talk of McLaren exploiting aero-elasticity to boost straightline performance has been rife since the middle of last season, and prompted the FIA to introduce more stringent new static-load tests.

Wings cannot be completely rigid: a degree of flex under load is inevitable. But it is also possible to exploit the properties of the composite materials to deliberately engineer a certain degree of flex under particular conditions to achieve an aerodynamic benefit.

The governing body announced a further tightening up of the permitted tolerances after the Australian Grand Prix but, even though McLaren passed these, the innuendo has continued. An amateur sleuth’s comparison of footage from the McLaren and Red Bull rear-facing cameras in Suzuka gained traction when it was boosted on social media by Verstappen’s father Jos.

Although Verstappen won in Japan, this was principally the result of a scintillating qualifying lap on a day neither McLaren driver quite delivered when it counted. In the race, the track layout militated against overtaking and the tyres proved too durable to provide strategic opportunities.

Stella denied that McLaren had become complacent and been caught out on the day.

“We didn’t need any wake-up call because we weren’t sleeping,” he said. “And we weren’t dreaming.

“We know if we don’t capitalise on the full performance of the car then we will be beaten – and if we capitalise then we may win by a very small margin. These are the conversations that happen within the team.”