Could McLaren have achieved more in the 2024 Formula 1 season? Team principal Andrea Stella is being self-critical after the Brazilian Grand Prix in Sao Paulo.
With a 62-point deficit and three race weekends still to go in the 2024 Formula 1 season, McLaren driver Lando Norris is now only an outside contender in the drivers’ championship. So it’s high time for McLaren to ask itself why the title chance is no longer a title chance: Does the traditional British team have itself to blame for some of the big gap to Max Verstappen?
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says: “If a team is honest, it will say: ‘Yes, there were many opportunities that we should look at.’ That’s how we approach things. Because if you don’t look in the rearview mirror, you won’t get any better. And while we’re in the title hunt this year, we want to be in it in the future, too. That’s why every lesson is important to us.”
“At the same time, we also have to remember that since the Miami update, McLaren has scored significantly more points than any other competitor, and not necessarily because we had the best car. That may have been the case in some races, but not in all of them.”
And this is what the world championship table would look like since Miami, as outlined by Stella: McLaren would have 497 points and thus a clear lead over Ferrari (406), Red Bull (349) and Mercedes (330). So if the first five race weekends of the 2024 season were left out, McLaren would have a bigger lead in the constructors’ championship than in the “real” championship, currently 593-557 against Ferrari.
McLaren does not comment on individual mistakes
But Stella does not reproach himself: McLaren performed “at a very high level” in 2024. “This high standard is positive and represents the foundation on which we want to build.”
“To do that, you certainly have to look at what hasn’t gone perfectly. But we do that all the time anyway. It fits very well with our company philosophy,” he explains, without going into specific failures.
If McLaren had avoided his individual mistakes, it could have been top of the constructors’ championship at the halfway point of the season, and not only in the fall. And then Norris’ situation in the drivers’ championship would probably also be different, namely better.
McLaren’s plan for the rest of the 2024 Formula 1 season
But Stella doesn’t want to go that far in his review of the Brazilian Grand Prix. He says: “We have to analyze the points table first. Mathematically, we still have a chance.”
“Either way, we will try to win the next races with Lando and Oscar. The last two venues should be quite good for us. Las Vegas is potentially more of a Ferrari place, but we’ll see.”
His team is focusing primarily on the constructors’ championship anyway, and it has “always been” that way, Stella insists. The supposedly lost world championship against Verstappen in the drivers’ championship “doesn’t change that, because even when we set out to support a driver, for us it was always secondary to the overall result for the constructors’ championship”.
What role external pressure might have played
That’s why Stella doesn’t believe the theory that McLaren driver Norris might have made too many mistakes under the new pressure of the World Championship title fight. He didn’t recognize any such pressure, says the McLaren team boss, adding, “I don’t think pressure played a decisive role. We enjoyed this challenge.”
“And while there aren’t many more chances coming up in the rest of the racing season, right now we’re extremely happy with our results and the work we’ve done this year.”