McLaren boss Andrea Stella has admitted that Red Bull’s strategy gamble in Formula 1‘s Spanish Grand Prix caused the team more concern than had been envisaged.
Max Verstappen was the standalone challenger to McLaren’s dominance in Barcelona up until a chaotic conclusion culminated in a penalty that demoted him to 10th.
With McLaren’s expected advantage being realised in the opening stages, Red Bull resorted to pitting Verstappen on Lap 12 in a move which earned him the race lead.
Verstappen came in to make his second stop 18 laps later and utilised the fresher tyres to set about overcoming the time loss that the additional pit stop had created.
The Dutchman pumped in numerous fastest laps to reduce the gap to Lando Norris ahead down to six seconds, with Oscar Piastri another three seconds up the road.
Stella has recalled that unease began to spread on the McLaren pit wall about the threat that Verstappen’s blistering pace at that stage might pose to its eventual 1-2.
“Well, when we saw Verstappen go in, we thought he would be on a three-stop and we thought it’s not going to be a problem, because we have already overtaken him on track and we should have a decent pace advantage,” Stella told media including Motorsport Week.
“But the reality is that he was fast. He was fast and when we went on the Medium tyres in the second stint, we were pushing, controlling the pace and he was catching up very rapidly, more rapidly than we hoped for.
So at some stage we even asked our drivers if we should push more and both gave answers like, ‘I’m not sure I have much more pace than this’.
“So, at that stage, we were a little worried that it could have been a situation more open than we thought it would be in the first stint.”
However, Verstappen’s charge petered out as his rubber began to degrade, and even another undercut attempt at the last round of stops wasn’t enough to leap Norris.
“At some stage it would have also been tricky for us because we had Oscar and Lando that were like 2.5 seconds apart or something, so if we needed to cover Verstappen it would have been a bit of a problem with them,” Stella highlighted.
“Thankfully, Verstappen started to tail off a bit, Oscar found quite a lot of pace at the end of the second stint and this allowed us to go through the pit stop sequence in a controlled way.
“So I think well done to the drivers from this respect, well done to our tyre engineers, and overall I think this was a good execution of today’s race.”
McLaren convinced it chose right strategy
But despite Red Bull’s gamble triggering a bigger-than-expected headache at McLaren, Stella believes that the conventional two-stop was the quicker route to the end.
“I think a two-stop is faster,” the Italian insisted. “It comes with some risks in relation to the fact that when you have such a fast three-stopper, you need to push on a two-stop, so you need to push on long stints. And sometimes it’s a little unpredictable how much your tyres will go off.
“If you look at the race, if you look at the times at the start of the stint, we were very careful not to push too much at the start of the stint. Because if you push too much at the start of the stint, then you’re going to have some degradation at the end. Which ultimately is what happened with Verstappen.
“I think in what will have been his second or third stint, maybe the third, he pushed so much, but then at some stage he tailed off.
“It’s a limited budget. You have to just decide where you use it. But on a two-stop, you are much more exposed. If your tyres go off, then you have to stay on it. And it’s quite brutal when they go off. I think the two-stop is faster, but with some degree of risk.”
READ MORE – Why Red Bull opted to pit Max Verstappen under late Safety Car in F1 Spanish GP
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