McLaren boss Andrea Stella has admitted that the pace advantage that Red Bull held with Max Verstappen through the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix was unexpected.
The Woking-based squad’s five-race winning run was brought to an emphatic end at Monza as Verstappen commanded proceedings to grab his third victory of 2025.
Despite missing out on pole position, both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were convinced that McLaren would mount a renewed challenge to Verstappen in the race.
But while Norris obtained the lead when Verstappen was told to relinquish the position after he cut the chicane at the start, the Dutchman soon cruised back through.
Verstappen was as much as six seconds ahead in the opening stint, inspiring McLaren to gamble on a late pitstop sequence that increased his margin to 19 seconds.
Like Red Bull counterpart Laurent Mekies, Stella has expressed surprise that the reigning champions had no response at any point to Verstappen’s dominant showing.
“Well, I have to admit here that while we were expecting not to be as dominant as we were in Hungary and Zandvoort, we did not expect to have this kind of gap to any of our competitors,” Stella told media including Motorsport Week.
“We thought we would still be potentially, hopefully, as competitive, as fast as anybody else.
“But we have to admit that yesterday in Red Bull were one or two times faster than us and probably today they were a little bit more than that, considering that Verstappen was in condition to overtake Lando and considering how much he was already in the gap in the first stint.”
McLaren recognises area to improve after Monza loss
Since becoming renowned as the benchmark team in mid-2024, McLaren has tended to be most vulnerable at the tracks where a low-downforce package is required.
Stella recognised that Red Bull’s superiority at Monza showcased that McLaren still has scope to improve to possess an advantage across every circuit configuration.
“Like I said yesterday, there may be some technical reasons why that is the case,” the Italian continued.
“I think we have seen that anytime Red Bull have gone on a low lateral drag, so small rear wheels, they seem to retain a lot of aerodynamic efficiency.
“And I think I explained yesterday that we design our car not in this regime but in a different regime.
“But this tends to follow a trend that we also had last year, so I think for us in terms of fundamental design, there is certainly a lesson to be learned because we don’t want to be competitive only in a certain category of circuits. We want to be competitive in all circuits.”
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