Andrea Stella: For us, Lando’s victory is a weight off our shoulders

Andrea Stella believes that Lando Norris’ first victory has not only lifted a burden from the British McLaren driver’s shoulders, but from the entire team.

Lando made his Formula 1 debut in 2019 and opened the scoring on his 110th attempt, with such pace yesterday that he crossed the finish line almost 8 seconds ahead of second-placed Max Verstappen.

This performance was made possible by a number of factors: the modernized MCL38 car, the expertly executed first segment of the Miami Grand Prix, in which Norris worked very correctly with the tires, allowing him to wait until the safety car appeared on the track. (this happened due to the collision between Haas of Kevin Magnussen and Williams Logan Sargent), which allowed McLaren to limit itself to a single pit stop on lap 29, after which Lando retained the lead.

“In reality, a long period without victories was already starting to put pressure on him, but this burden was also on our shoulders, because we knew: as soon as we give Lando a car with which he can fight for victories, he will do so. achieve results,” said Andrea Stella, McLaren team leader, after the finish. – That’s why we felt our responsibility, and I often repeated that everything now depends only on us, and not on Lando.

But we must admit that he continued to work on himself and improve his professional skills. We have already talked about how he prepared for the season last winter, mainly trying to improve his results in qualifying. And now he is showing excellent lap times, even when there is no need to give 100%. But when a driver has a fast car, he simply takes advantage of it, and Lando does just that.

I must admit he now has a very mature approach to running the race. Once Norris saw that there was not much he could do after the first lap, he decided to save his tires as he knew the conditions would turn in his favor at some point in the race.

And when the cars in front of him went to the pit stop, he showed incredible speed. Lando demonstrates excellent speed in qualifying and races very competently, making the most of the potential of his equipment.”

Andrea Stella stood on the podium with Norris in Miami to receive the winning trophy on behalf of McLaren, but as always he assessed his personal contribution to the common cause very modestly: “For the team leader, this is simply a victory that the entire team earned. My role is solely to serve and represent the team, all 850 employees. And now my thoughts, my whole soul are with our team, because I know what a huge amount of work had to be done to reach a turning point in the situation compared to what it was fourteen months ago.

But if there is one element that I would like to emphasize most, it is the quality of our engineers, our technicians, our technicians, in short, everyone. You have all worked really hard to make this possible. This is what I think about first and foremost as a team leader. Without all these great people we wouldn’t have gotten this far.”