McLaren Formula 1 boss Andrea Stella suspects the fragility of the tyres in the Australian Grand Prix meant the team’s advantage over Mercedes was unrepresentative.
The Woking squad capitalised on Max Verstappen’s brake failure to land a first podium at Albert Park since 2014 as Lando Norris took third place ahead of Oscar Piastri.
However, Mercedes endured a nightmare weekend Down Under as both drivers retired, leaving it 29 points behind McLaren in fourth place in the Constructors’ standings.
While George Russell was 40s behind Norris when he crashed on the last lap, Stella contends that is not an accurate reflection of McLaren and Mercedes’ respective pace.
“I think what happened today, in terms of split top pace between McLaren and Ferrari, potentially Verstappen could have been there,” Stella said. “But he already started to complain even at the start of the race. So it looks like, McLaren and Ferrari could have been there with Verstappen.
“But the split between these cars and then Aston, Mercedes and everyone else does surprise me. I was not expecting that.
“But science kind of supports the theory that today was a tyre-dominated race because definitely there’s not that difference in the car between a McLaren and a Mercedes.
“It’s more about dealing with the tyres because after 10 laps, if you halve your degradation compared to somebody else, your car may be apparently three, four-tenths faster just because you have much less degradation. So, I think it has to do with the anomaly of a very unique tyre behaviour here in Australia.”
Piastri had expressed surprise that Sergio Perez failed to catch him, though Red Bull revealed that his car had “significant load loss” from a tear-off lodged under his floor.
Nevertheless, Red Bull had struggled through practice with graining amid Pirelli’s decision to bring its Softest compounds to Melbourne turning the race into a two-stopper.
Stella points out that Red Bull’s superior degradation enabling it to use two sets of Softs in Bahrain shows that behaviour of the tyres is contributing to a fluctuating order.
Asked to explain how Red Bull encountered more trouble with graining than its rivals when it produces the most downforce on the grid, Stella replied: “I have to say that if you know somebody that kind of has enough expertise to explain these situations with clarity, I would employ him right away.
“Think about Bahrain. In Bahrain, Red Bull was the only car that comfortably used the Soft tyres. But in Bahrain, you have no graining at all.
“No way that you can have graining because you don’t have enough grip to stress the tyres and strain the rubber to a point where the rubber generates graining. If that makes sense.
“So here is a completely different regime compared to Bahrain. But still, I would say harnessing this matter from an engineering point of view and saying, ‘oh, it’s very clear what we need to do on the car to be okay in Bahrain and to be okay here’, that’s not straightforward at all. Otherwise, everyone would be in a good spot.
“It’s really difficult. So, I don’t know. But I think even yesterday in P3 when Verstappen attempted a long run, that wasn’t a good long run. And we took a look at his tyres at the end of the long run and they were pretty finished in like 10, 15 laps.
“So, Red Bull did not enjoy any advantage apparently from a tyre handling point of view in a track where tyres were very soft and graining.
“But again, for the same reason I said before, it could be that we go in a similar track and things actually behave slightly differently.
“It’s one of the problems that you would call non-linear, whereby you change a little bit the conditions and the solution changes dramatically. That’s typically what happens with tyres.”
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