Photo credits: McLaren F1 Team
McLaren left Baku remaining in P5 of the F1 Constructors’ Championship but they did get some more daylight on their rivals behind – as they all failed to score a point. All in all, McLaren is now where it hoped to have been at the start of the year package wise. However, with Scuderia Ferrari already 48 points in front they have a lot of ground to make up.
McLaren made no secret of the fact that they were sacrificing Saturday’s Sprint for the chance of points on Sunday. A plan which came to fruition after Lando Norris started P7 and came home P9. Team boss Andrea Stella explained the team’s thinking post-race in Baku to media.
“We started from places 10 and 11 [in the sprint], and we knew we had eight quicker cars ahead of us,” Stella said. “Points are given from P1 to P8. So we needed to do something in order to score points. Our main objective of the weekend was always going to be the race because this is where you have more points available. The mission was to finish behind the top four cars, and that’s what we accomplished. So we are pleased with this result.”
As well as reflecting on Norris’ P9 at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Andrea Stella was keen to pay tribute to recent upgrades but wary of just how big the impact will be in Miami…and beyond.
“We achieved that thanks to the upgrades we fitted this weekend. Thanks go to the team back at the factory and at track for helping us bring these parts to the car. Over the next few races, we will be able to verify how much of that is a genuine improvement, and how much was track-specific,”
Lando Norris also seemed eager to wait before making any claims to the performance improvement as he told media: “It (the upgrade) didn’t help that much given the very slow-speed corners that we have. If you look at it on a pure lap-time basis, it probably didn’t help us too much. A tiny bit, but not too much. Maybe in Miami, we will see some bigger gains with more medium-speed corners. But it’s more of a different philosophy to have a baseline with, and that is a small step forward. More of the bigger gains are coming in the future.”
Andrea Stella also praised another strong weekend from Lando Norris as he stated: “Lando, once again, was rock solid. Another clean weekend brings us a couple of very useful points.” Meanwhile, with Norris’ teammate Oscar Piastri having been unwell all weekend, to cross the line P11 was very impressive and did not go unnoticed by Stella in his post-race remarks.
“We were highly impressed with Oscar too. He’s been unwell this weekend but managed to focus on the job, also delivering a clean weekend with no mistakes. Thank you to our excellent medical staff for their continuous support throughout the weekend. We hope he’ll be feeling better in a few days when we start again in Miami,” said Andrea Stella.
Despite such positivity and reliability, it is clear that Andrea Stella is aware that there is more to come and also perhaps some luck involved in their standing position at present.
“I still think some of the opposition didn’t maximise their performance during the weekend. So we have to be careful, especially Alpine, they seem to have a bit of a troubled weekend. But I think we leave Baku with many positives. Without the safety car, we would have been ahead of Russell in the second stint. But with the safety car, actually Russell overtook us. I’m not saying we were as quick as Russell, but you may give it a go at trying to keep him behind.” stated Stella.
What Baku has done is provided McLaren with a baseline to build on and with races coming thick and fast, this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix will be used as a marker by many to see whether the Woking-based manufacturer is going forwards after all.
