McLaren boss Andrea Stella has admitted the monumental advantage that the team harboured in race trim at the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix was a “little surprising”.
The Woking-based squad’s dominant opening to the campaign continued in Miami with a maximum points haul as Oscar Piastri maintained his recent winning streak.
Despite pole-sitter Max Verstappen preserving the lead until Lap 14, Piastri crossed the line with a 37-second gap to the nearest non-McLaren in third, George Russell.
McLaren’s crushing margin succeeded team boss Andrea Stella claiming that Red Bull is prone to pushing wrong narratives about the squad’s competitive advantage.
Stella, though, has conceded that the rate at which Piastri and Norris rushed into the distance in the two MCL39 cars even exceeded the team’s pre-race expectations.
“Yes, I’m a little surprised that the gap we had today is as big as we saw,” Stella told media including Motorsport Week post-race at the Miami International Autodrome.
“I thought that we could have had an advantage from a tyre management point of view, but I didn’t think that the tyre management advantage would lead to this level of gap throughout the race.
“Yesterday, when we made the comments about [our] competitors, we commented on the performance in qualifying, and I think myself, I admitted that the car doesn’t perform as well as we wanted in qualifying and it becomes a little difficult to be exploited at the limit in new tyres and empty fuel tanks.
“But clearly in the race, when you put consecutive laps together and you have a little bit of degradation in hot conditions, then it looks like the car performs very well.”
McLaren tyre trickery has surpassed expectations
Stella, alongside McLaren’s leading rivals, acknowledged that the reigning champions have mastered the “black arts” when it comes to managing the tyres in the race.
But while he acknowledged that the team made a concerted attempt to maximise that area, the Italian revealed that the extent has surpassed what he had envisaged.
“I want to go back to saying that that’s a result of some very targeted engineering work,” he continued.
“If you had asked me before the season, I would say, yeah, we have invested in improving the interaction with the tyres, but I wouldn’t have said that the extent would have been the one that we see in this kind of races.”
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