McLaren boss Andrea Stella has insisted the team’s impressive tyre management in races hasn’t produced an expected counter-trait with its 2025 Formula 1 challenger.
The MCL39 is the class leader in tyre preservation, which helped it carve out an impressive lead in the dry phase of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix and meant that Oscar Piastri was untroubled en route to victory at the Bahrain International Circuit.
Usually, as with Ferrari last year, good tyre management in races can make it extremely tricky to generate warm-up quickly in a qualifying situation.
However, this has yet to be the case for McLaren, given the team has taken three pole positions out of four rounds so far this term.
Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner pointed out this particular peculiarity after the season-opener at Albert Park, saying, “what’s quite strange is that they enjoy great warm-up, but also very low degradation.
“Usually one comes at the expense of the other. So, they certainly at this circuit seem to have mastered that.”
After Piastri secured pole in Bahrain last weekend, Stella was queried on this double-threat McLaren seems to possess.
“In general, the two qualities don’t live together in the same car, traditionally,” Stella told select media, including Motorsport Week.
“I am not sure, so far, we have really been challenged with tyre warm-up in general, and this is not only for the McLaren car, I think in general tyre warm-up has not been a topic or a performance differentiator.”
Tyre warm-up could be F1 circuit specific according to McLaren boss
Explaining further, Stella assumed that tyre warm-up would be a circuit-specific problem, one that wasn’t an issue in Bahrain.
“I would be surprised that there is a tyre warm-up issue in Bahrain with this kind of tarmac and this kind of temperatures, so I think that is why we see that warm-up is not a problem, because I think it doesn’t exist as a factor, at least so far,” he said.
“It could happen at some other tracks, but I don’t think here is a factor.”
McLaren has yet to be caught out by this issue just yet, as its class-leading car continues to produce top results.
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