[ad_1]
McLaren F1 principal Andrea Stella said he was not surprised by the speed of the Ferrari SF-24 with which Charles Leclerc dominated the Texas GP – explaining that the Italian car had performed similarly in both previous races, but the Scuderia did not manage to bring her to the surface.
McLaren won the Azerbaijan and Singapore GPs with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris respectively, but the English team’s principal Andrea Stella said it was helped a little by the fact that Ferrari failed to make the most of its performance cavallino in these two races – as he did in the US GP on Sunday (20/10).
In Baku, Charles Leclerc took the blame for failing to emerge victorious in his close-race battle with Piastri, while in Singapore a miscalculation by the Scuderia on Saturday with tire temperatures left him Leclerc quite far back at the start, and deprived him of any hope of victory (while Carlos Sainz lost his hopes with his accident in the qualifying tests).
“They were fast and in the previous races consistently”Stella said of his former team, which he left together with Fernando Alonso to join McLaren in 2015. “If anything, they weren’t able to get the most out of their momentum.
In Baku Leclerc was, to be fair, in a position to win the race. In Singapore we expected Leclerc to be as competitive for pole position as he was for the race. So we are not surprised that the Ferrari it’s so close”added the Italian.
Oscar Piastri in the McLaren MCL38 at the 2024 US GP
MCLAREN MEDIA CENTRE
Still, Stella expressed optimism that in the next five races to end this season, McLaren will have answers to Ferrari’s speed: “I believe that the following tracks are more suited to the characteristics of our car.
In relation to Singapore, the track (of Austin) it has a lot of places where you brake at low speed for slow corners, plus the wind, and we know that in those conditions our car doesn’t necessarily perform at its best.
It’s not as good as it is in some medium-speed turns, in light winds, as was the case in Singapore, Zandvoort or Hungary. We know that these three tracks suit our car, and here (in Austin) I already expected that we would have our toughest race out of the remaining 6.”
And he concluded: “We must also continue to develop the car. In Austin we had some upgrades to the front of it, but they weren’t all that big in terms of the lap time they offered. We have a couple of new things for the next few races, and we’ll see if we can change the competitiveness of the car.”
[ad_2]