McLaren Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella says the low drag set-up doesn’t explain why Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri could qualify only fifth and sixth in Saturday’s wet qualifying session at Spa.
Having been fastest in the dry on Friday the papaya cars lost out in Q3 to the Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, and the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton.
Stella said that McLaren hadn’t compromised relative to rivals by going for a lower downforce setting, noting that other cars were also edging towards higher downforce and had comparable top speeds.
“Definitely we wanted to resist the temptation to prepare a car for wet,” said Stella of the wing choice.
“Because we know that all forecast models at the moment are predicting a dry race, and here in Spa, you need to have the right wing level when you race in dry conditions, because if you are short of top speed, it can be pretty challenging.
“So we stayed on the same wing we had yesterday in practice, where the car proved to be quite competitive in dry conditions.
“I have to say that when I looked after qualifying at the GPS overlays with some of our direct competitors, like Red Bull, Mercedes. Ferrari, I thought we would have a bit more top speed advantage.”
“They are not on a wet setup, I think they were just decently competitive today, and they seem to be also at the same time on a good rear wing level for tomorrow.”
“So I don’t think McLaren can say today we left some tenths off the table just because we were on a dry setup, because we see that our direct competitors seem to be on a similar level of rear wing.”
Stella noted that McLaren looked particularly strong on Friday because the drivers ran with their engines turned up, while adding that other cars were simply quick in the wet qualifying session.
“So I think in practice I think we have used the potential of the car, even in terms for instance, of engine settings,” he said. “So I think we appeared to be fast and competitive, but we need to see what the others were doing.”
“This is certainly true against Red Bull. I think when it comes today’s qualifying session, when it comes to Ferrari, Mercedes, I think they were simply on par with us. If you take the strategy in Q3 we went out with a single set, with the fuel for the session, while Leclerc took more risk with the new set at the end.
“If the rain had increased, this would have been a too risky strategy, but he capitalised on the fact that he used new tyres and one lap of fuel. So actually, if you look at that, we are almost within the fuel effect between McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes.
“And I’m sure Lando and Oscar have a few points in the Q3 laps in which they can say, like we could have gone a couple of tenths faster here and there. I think today, we are happy with this kind of competitiveness.””
Stella said that Friday practice suggested that the team has a good race setup, especially in terms of tyre usage.
“Yesterday we seemed to be in a good place, in particular in terms of a long run pace,” he said. “We seem to be able to keep the very high degradation for everyone relatively more under control. But we will see tomorrow if we are able to do the same.”
Stella believes that the biggest challenge will come from Verstappen, who starts 11th.
“Max is definitely a threat. I think he has been exceptionally fast in dry conditions. He was very fast today in wet conditions. I think we knew that in these kind of tracks, still Red Bull were likely to have an edge on us. I think this was proven today in wet, and to some extent, even yesterday, in dry conditions.
“So he remains the favourite for the victory tomorrow, even if he starts outside the first 10 positions on the grid. And we have to look at ourselves. We have to maximise the fact that we were competitive as well.
“We have a tyre strategy that we are happy with, with two hard tyres, and we’ll have to drive well, exploit the strengths of the car, and hopefully gain a time advantage at the start. That means that even if Max made it through the field, we will be enough far ahead.”
