McLaren's Stella sees title race being settled in the margins

With Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris so closely matched race to race, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella is focused on ensuring his team provides both his drivers with the means to settle this year’s drivers’ championship battle through superior execution of the finer points of each race weekend.

Piastri won the Belgian Grand Prix by overtaking Norris on the race start, capitalizing on a slight spell of wheelspin from his teammate to slipstream past on the Kemmel Straight. With Norris having won the previous race at Silverstone when Piastri picked up a penalty behind the safety car, Stella says the margins that will divide the two at the end of the season will come down to the finest of details.

“There is very, very little between our two drivers,” Stella said. “And this is because the two drivers are racing at a very, very high level. We are lucky at McLaren to have two drivers that, deservedly, are fighting for the world championship.

“I think the difference will be made by the accuracy, the precision, the quality of the execution. We saw in Silverstone that a sporting issue for Oscar – during the safety car restart and the consequent penalty – cost him the race. And [at Spa] we saw that, somehow related to the circuit characteristic, it would have always been very difficult for Lando to keep the position, starting first at the safety car restart. At the same time, I think Lando didn't help himself by not having a great gap on the finish line.

“So I think the execution is what is going to make the main difference. We, as a team, we will try and make sure that, from a reliability point of view, from a team operation point of view, we are as good as possible, such that it will be the drivers deciding their own outcome in terms of competing for the drivers' world championship.”

While a lot of post-race focus was on Norris’ start and small mistakes made in his pursuit of Piastri, Stella says the standard of performance from the Australian at Spa needs acknowledging too.

“Very, very, very high quality," he said. "Like I said before, we have two drivers which, to the standards that even myself in my career have been close to [and racing] with multiple world champions, I think Lando and Oscar are operating at that level.

“Oscar, if anything, the only [issue] he had was in qualifying, where his laps weren't perfect. At the same time, we have to say that after the Sprint, he said, ‘Yeah, I'm pole position after the Sprint quali, but maybe that's not the right place to be in pole position;. And as a joke, after the qualifying, he said, ‘That was not my best lap in Q3, but perhaps this is the best place not to have the best lap in Q3.’

“Oscar, even in the long run on medium tires, I think he was able to control the degradation, and in fact I think he scored his best lap, if I'm not wrong, on the second [to] last. Meaning that he was ultimately controlling his mirrors and the time to Lando.

“So, overall hats off to Oscar, great drive by Lando as well, and our reward was a P1, P2 for McLaren – which at Spa is particularly important, because this is a circuit where we struggled in the previous years. And it has a particular meaning, I think, from a performance and a technical point of view, that we are performing at this level in a circuit with these characteristics. So well done to the entire team.”