McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says Max Verstappen is definitely back in the title fight after his victory in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Verstappen’s win in Baku was his second in succession following the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, and came in a race where championship leader Oscar Piastri crashed out on the opening lap. With Verstappen still 69 points adrift of Piastri, but having taken 35 points out of the Australian’s lead over the last two races, Stella says Red Bull’s performance improvement makes the defending champion a genuine threat.
“I think Singapore should be a return to the kind of circuit characteristics that should allow us to express the full potential of our car,” Stella told SiriusXM. “However, I think what Red Bull are showing at the moment is not simply related to the circuits.
“I think they have made a genuine improvement. They had upgrades in Monza. They seem to have found a way to exploit these upgrades with the setup. I said that [after qualifying] already that Max and Red Bull will be regular contenders for the wins, and definitely Max is a contender for the Drivers’ Championship.
“So there’s a lot of work ahead of us. We need to stay focused, improve, and we will go again.”
Stella says the fact that Lando Norris was limited to seventh place in Azerbaijan is a sign of the McLaren being beaten on pure pace, despite a scruffy weekend from the team.
“The track we knew wasn’t necessarily the most suited to the strengths of our car, but somehow we didn’t capitalize on the potential that was available. In the race, the car was not fast enough to overtake anybody, so Lando spent all race in traffic.
“There’s some work to do to improve the car, or this year we need to look at the set-up, [because] there won’t be any more developments. Also I think there’s some learning because we seem to be able to design very fast cars for some kind of circuits, but when we have these types of braking and short corners, we struggle a little bit.
“So like I said, lots of learning for the drivers and for the team, and then we need to look also at the operations. The pit stop once again wasn’t a fast one and we had some issues with reliability in practice. So one to take all the information, review, reset and come back stronger.”
