McLaren’s Stella sees the title race be arranged in the margins | Racer

With Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris so closely agreed to race, the McLaren Team head Andrea Stella is aimed at ensuring that his team offers both drivers the means to arrange this year’s Championship struggle by the superior performance of the finer points of each race weekend.

Piastri won the Belgian Grand Prix by catching up with the Race Start and making use of a light spin from his teammate to slide past the Kemmel Straight. With Norris who won the previous race in Silverstone when Piastri picked up a penalty behind the security cars, Stella says that the margins that the two will distribute at the end of the season will come to the best details.

“There is very, very little between our two drivers,” said Stella. “And this is because the two drivers race at a very, very high level. We are lucky with McLaren to have two drivers who, rightly, fight for the world championship.

“I think the difference will be made by the accuracy, the precision, the quality of the execution. We saw in Silverstone that a sporting issue for Oscar – during the safety car restarts and the resulting fine – cost him the race. [at Spa] We saw that it was somehow related to the circuit characteristic, it would always have been very difficult for Lando to maintain the position, first starting with the restart of the safety car. At the same time, I think Lando did not help itself by not having a big gap on the finish line.

“So I think the implementation is what makes the most important difference. We, as a team, will try to ensure that from a reliability position from a team operation point we are as good as possible, so that it is the drivers who determine their own result in terms of competing for the world championship of the driver.”

Although a lot of focus after the race was on the start of Norris and small mistakes made in his pursuit of Piastri, Stella says that the Australian’s performance standard at Spa also recognizes.

“Very, very, very high quality,” he said. “Like I said before, we have two drivers who, according to the standards that even have been in my career, have been close [and racing] With several world champions I think Lando and Oscar work at that level.

“Oscar, if there is anything, the only one [issue] He had himself in qualifying, where his laps were not perfect. At the same time we have to say that after the sprint he said: ‘Yes, I am pole position after the Sprintwali, but maybe that is not the right place to be in pole position;. And as a joke, after qualifying, he said: “That wasn’t my best round in Q3, but perhaps this is the best place not to have the best round in Q3.”

“Oscar, even in the long term on medium -sized tires, I think he was able to control the relegation, and in fact I think he scored his best round, if I am not wrong, on the second [to] last. Which means that he ultimately checked his mirrors and the time to control Lando.

“So, overall hats on Oscar, great drive through Lando, and our reward was a P1, P2 for McLaren – which is particularly important at Spa, because this is a circuit where we struggled in previous years. And it has a special meaning, I think, from a performance and a technical point of view that we are being performed at this level in a circuit with these characteristics.