Andrea Stella: We managed to minimize losses

Andrea Stella summed up the difficult weekend for McLaren in Las Vegas, noting that the team still managed to keep losses to a minimum.

Andrea Stella: “Let’s summarize the weekend in Las Vegas, and of course I would like to start with congratulations to Max Verstappen; he deservedly became world champion in 2024.

Max is one of the best drivers in Formula 1 history, very fast and very stable. Last season he won a lot of races and people started to think that winning was easy for him – no, it’s never easy. I think he proved his skills this year when he didn’t always have the best car.

At the same time, we are proud that McLaren is leading the constructors’ championship. But at the start of the season our team missed too many points, although after four to five races we were on par with Verstappen in terms of pace. I’m talking about Lando Norris, who performed well with the support of the entire team, including Oscar Piastri.

McLaren is on a very good trajectory and together with our drivers, Lando and Oscar, we will be ready to fight for championship victory next year.

Admittedly, we predicted that we would have a hard time here in Vegas in weather conditions that were not suitable for our car, and those predictions came true. We are not satisfied with the 6th and 8th results in qualifying and the 6th and 7th places in the race. Today we mainly had to deal with rubber granulation in the first two parts of the distance, and we could do nothing to stop this phenomenon.

But thanks to a combination of several factors, we managed to prevent granulation of the rubber on Lando’s MCL38 in the final stretch. We took a number of measures, including some quite extreme adjustments using the tools he had in the car, and he also adjusted his driving style a bit. He then managed to ride at the pace of the leaders.

It is important that the team understood how to act to get the most out of the car even in such conditions. Although we lost a certain number of points in the Constructors’ Championship to Ferrari this weekend, we still have to consider that we managed to keep losses to a minimum in Vegas.

There are two more stages before the end of the championship, and they will be held on circuits better suited to our car. The matter is not over yet, we still have to work hard, so now all our attention must be focused on preparing for the races in Qatar and Abu Dhabi. We are going to try to end the season with good results.”