McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has praised the talent on the Formula 1 grid, believing it to be the most competitive in the sport’s history as the season nears its conclusion.
F1 has seen varying levels of talent in the grids of yesteryear, with one season seeing six World Champions racing for title glory, including Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel.
Since then, the dominance of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen has kept the number of champions and race winners to a minimum, with only nine drivers becoming new winners.
Championship contender Oscar Piastri is the most recent driver to add his name to the new winner’s list, as F1 starts to enjoy a more competitive field of drivers.
Stella believes that the new crop of drivers is the best in F1 history, with the Italian having seen many different grids since his first season as a Ferrari engineer in 2000.
“I think what we see in this season in Formula 1, in terms of competitiveness – and this is something that you may pick for a little bit of analysis – I don’t recall that there was such a competitive pool of drivers in any other season,” he said to media, including Motorsport Week, ahead of the Las Vegas GP.
A ‘new generation of drivers’ behind F1’s most competitive field
Stella believes that almost half the grid is now driving at levels capable of winning the title, highlighting the substantial training the drivers receive at a young age to mould them.
Piastri, Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc are amongst drivers to graduate driver academies, with Stella stating the intense training is translating to competitive grids.
“The new generation of drivers, they’re just so good, and now you have seven, eight drivers which are at World Championship level. Like I say, I’m not sure this has happened before,” he said.
“Potentially this is because of how good the junior categories now are. These guys, they go karting and they have the data. They train at a certain level when they are adolescents.
“This has made the competitive field extremely, extremely tight, and therefore the difference is in this last one per cent.”
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