Stella: Collaboration between riders benefits the team

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella believes that the growing partnership between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will be one of the favorable factors that will influence the work of the coming season.

With the exception of a minor incident during the Italian Grand Prix, when contact occurred between the McLaren cars, nothing marred the good working relationship between the partners.

“One of the strengths of our team is the relationship between Lando and Oscar,” Australian publication Speedcafe quotes Stella. – I must say that it is nice to be Lando’s partner because we have already seen that he had the same relationship with Carlos Sainz and with Daniel Ricciardo. Therefore, it must be recognized that Lando makes a great contribution to creating such a fruitful relationship, and all this is useful for the team because it contributes to the professional growth of both riders.

And we also have Oscar, who has similar qualities. There is a natural process, the teammates gradually get to know each other better and we see that this creates the conditions for a very fruitful collaboration between the riders.

I have always observed that their approaches to governing and solving technical problems complement each other to some extent. This means that from the first training on Friday, everyone studies their partner’s telemetry and pays attention to certain points.

Lando can say he can ride a certain part of the lap better because he knows Oscar will improve there too. Piastri, analyzing Norris’ telemetry, is able to voice his opinion, and all of this, in my opinion, helped him as the weekend progressed.

This year we are preparing to take the next step forward, including the collaboration between the riders and the way they interact with the team. When we talk about the possibilities we have, we are talking about the technical aspects of the machine with regard to the future.

Last season we saw that we could have done better when it comes to organizing effective teamwork. In some qualifying we showed insufficiently good results that did not match the car’s capabilities. Usually it is possible to make improvements in this regard if we establish a fruitful collaboration between the drivers and engineers and the entire team as a whole.

In general, we can count on the interaction between the riders, so our team looks forward to the future with confidence and I am very curious to see how this collaboration will develop.”