McLaren still bullish on F1 title hopes despite early season setbacks

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says his team's prospects for Formula 1 championships this season remain strong despite a number of missed opportunities to score points in the first five rounds.

At the season opener in Australia, Oscar Piastri crashed on the way to the grid, while both cars failed to start the second round in China due to reliability issues. After back-to-back podiums in Japan and Miami – the second race featuring both cars in the top three and a one-two in the Sprint – McLaren made a strategic error in Canada to miss out on points and drop 113 adrift of Mercedes in the constructors’ championship.

“Certainly the start of the season has been challenging,” Stella said. “We've had issues of different kinds – the first race we had the issues with Oscar as he was in the laps to the grid. Then China, it was a painful one, a problem on the electrical side of the power unit.

“In Canada, we had issues pretty much in all areas of racing, from the sporting racing side to reliability. So there's definitely lots to take away and review. At the same time, there's encouraging indications in terms of the development of the car and how much we are learning in terms of power unit exploitation.

“So it's definitely below what would have been our expectations to be in contention for the championship. But at the same time, we want to take the positives. This is still five races out of at least 22 – we will see if the first of the Middle East races will be recovered.

“We don't think very much of what's been. We just try to learn every day, such that for the next race we are as prepared as possible. We are definitely believers that the championship is not signed off. We want to be in this championship and we want the championship to be decided in Abu Dhabi. I think this is a strong determination that we have at McLaren and we want to make this happen.”

McLaren came in for criticism for its strategic call – starting the Canadian Grand Prix on intermediate tires from the second row, with the rest of the top 10 on slicks – but while Stella acknowledged the error, he says multiple other issues at least happened in the same race.

“In hindsight, definitely the points would have been possible, but we didn't have pace that could have allowed us to recover [to Franco Colapinto in sixth] … I’m not sure that it was possible in terms of catching up after the issues we had at the start," he said. "The car was damaged [after contact with Alex Albon], so Oscar lost some performance because of aerodynamic reasons.

“On Lando [Norris] we had two issues. One was that the car started to overheat, therefore we needed to add a stop relatively early, which was to clean the radiators. I'm not sure how much this was clear on television or for you following the race, but the stop that we did with Lando was actually because of reliability problems.

“Then there was a gearbox problem, which is independent of this overheating. This gearbox problem would have happened in all cases. [Sunday] was not Lando's day, he would not have finished the race. If there's a day to have all the problems in a single instance, then that was the day.”