McLaren Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella says that the MCL38’s rear wing is a “red herring” and that rivals being distracted by it is “good news” for the Woking team.
McLaren’s flexing low-downforce rear wing became a major focus in the wake of the Baku race.
Stella sees the fuss around the wing a positive because it distracts other teams as they focus on one facet of the pace-setting McLaren.
“The legality of the wing is incontrovertible and it’s a fact,” said Stella. “Personally, as team principal of McLaren, I find that so much attention in our rear wing is just good news, because it means that opponents are not focussing on themselves, and F1 is such a marginal game, it’s so complicated.
“I keep repeating to my team, focus on yourself. So for me, when I see that there’s so much attention from other teams, it means that they will be doing work, they will be doing analysis, they will be talking to the FIA and there’s limited time and limited energy. They’re using this time and energy to chase something that I think is a red herring.
“So for me, as McLaren, that’s just good news. We try to stay focused on ourselves, we want to come with technical solutions that may be challenging, but totally sound from a legality point of view.
“If others want to get destructive, keep doing that. Because for us, it’s just good news.”
On the subject why the team agreed with the FIA to make changes he made it clear that they won’t have a major impact on performance.
“Well, we want to proactively have conversation with the FIA, because it looks like this story is becoming big for us,” he said. “Making changes is pretty much transparent, so we may as well do it.
“It won’t be a big consequence from a performance point of view. This also gave us the opportunity to remind the FIA that, we also do some due diligence in terms of studying other people.
“We don’t want to spend so much energy and time with journalists and trying to create big stories.
“We just told the FIA what we think is happening, and we trust, and we are confident that they will talk to the other teams, and make sure. that they fix their own issues, which may be less visible, but definitely they do exist.”
Asked by formu1a.uno to elaborate on the team’s own interest in rivals Stella insisted that it the team’s approach was more low-key than that of others.
“I think when I say about focussing on yourself, this is not that you don’t look at the competitors,” he said.
“This is how big a story it is that you create around competitors. And I don’t want my people at McLaren to go racing and think, ‘Oh, of course they won, because they have this solution.’
“It’s just such a distraction from a mindset point of view. When you go racing, you think and you focus on yourself.
“This doesn’t mean that you don’t look at the competitors, and you don’t study how the formation happens on competitors, and you don’t go to the FIA and say, have you looked at that? That’s technical due diligence, that’s tough competition that we do have at McLaren.
“Having done that, now we focus on ourselves. And everyone go racing, thinking about maximising what we have.
“Not creating and pumping these kind of stories which become such a distraction for your own team, because they will be thinking, ‘Oh, McLaren, they are fast because they have that.’
“We are in Singapore. Personally, I haven’t seen a lot of a slot gap opening. Have you? We are today a pole position. That’s where I want people to focus.
“In this sense, I think this is a distraction, and it’s good news, not in the sense that we don’t look and study competitors, because this is part of total competition in F1.”
