McLaren F1 team principal Andrea Stella was full of praise for Lando Norris following the Briton’s crushingly dominant win at the 2024 Dutch GP, in which he beat Max Verstappen by over 22 seconds in the Dutchman’s home race.
Whilst the final winning margin and the overall superior car performance that allowed them to win the race in such commanding fashion made all the headlines, it was yet another race start in which Norris lost out to Verstappen after starting on pole position, as the reigning world champion seized the initiative and took the lead as the McLaren stuttered off the line.
Speaking after the race in Zandvoort, Stella admitted the team has to work and “very carefully” review why their start performance is faltering compared to its rivals – and even hinted at this being a recurring theme of Verstappen and Red Bull having better relative start line performance over the course of the season:
“The start is such a fundamental element to go racing. It’s as important as car performance,” he explained. “And we do have to look very carefully into the details about why our competitors seem to gain a little bit on us.
“I think statistically, over the course of the season, we are competitive from a launch point of view, but we see that there are some cars, like [Max] Verstappen for instance, who seem to be performing very well at the start.
“If you can capitalise a good qualifying performance with a good start, it makes your life so much easier. So definitely we have to look into this.
“And as I’ve already said, this comes from the driver in terms of their launch procedure execution, and it comes from a team point of view, because there are some aspects which are under teams’ control. And we need to look into what kind of optimisation we are able to do.”
Despite the difficult start, Stella revealed that he was confident in a swift recovery after seeing how Norris was able to keep up with the Red Bull in the opening stages without using much of his tyres and getting to the limits of the car – which even allowed them to maintain their original strategic plan instead of trying an early undercut to get ahead:
“It must have been around a few laps before the overtaking,” he said when asked about the moment he realised the race could be won. “Where Max’s pace started to drop off compared to Lando, and looking at Lando’s data, he still seemed to be pretty comfortable.
“Like, he could be fast without having to, you know, abuse car balance or abuse the tyres. So, there it became apparent that with this kind of pace, we could have overtaken.
“Even [more so] because Max was on a Monaco [level of downforce] rear wing, and we were on a relatively smaller rear wing. So we knew that if we got into potentially what was half a second or something, we could have gained massively down the straight.
“So, I think around lap 15, I don’t remember the number, I don’t want to quote it, but at that stage it became apparent, like, let’s not think about undercutting, because I think this situation will sort itself naturally with overtaking.”
The Italian admitted the team “would have never thought” of having such a strong performance at a track in which they struggled even as recently as 2023, when they trailed Red Bull and even Aston Martin on pure pace:
“We would have never thought that coming into Zandvoort, which has been a difficult venue for us in the past, we could put together such a strong performance, [firstly] in qualifying and then confirm that in the race.
“Today was definitely beyond expectation – including yesterday, in terms of qualifying performance – in terms of race performance, and to some extent even the tyre degradation was very good to the point that Lando scored the fastest lap of the race at the last lap.”
Stella also praised Norris’ personal performance – the Briton outqualified his team-mate by nearly half-a-second and finished the race over 27 seconds ahead – saying he was “absolutely faultless” and finally proved his critics wrong with a performance the team had “always known” he was capable of:
“I’m just very happy for the team, and very happy for Lando himself – I think he just proved the level of competitiveness he can pull off. We know that, we’ve always known that.
“He’s been absolutely faultless this weekend,” he concluded.
McLaren now sits just 30 points behind Red Bull in the constructors’ standings – with Norris 70 behind Verstappen – and with 9 races and three sprints remaining, the squad is seriously looking at challenging for both titles at the closing stages of the season.
