Andrea Stella felt the McLaren F1 Team were good to score six points during Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix on the back of a tough race for the Woking-based outfit.
Lando Norris finished seventh after struggling early on with the medium and hard tyres, the Briton falling through the field as he also was compromised by the high downforce set-up on his MCL60. His switch to the soft tyre compound for the final twenty-seven laps brought him back into top ten contention, the Briton ultimately ending seventh, just behind Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s George Russell.
Oscar Piastri, who had finished second in Saturday’s Sprint race at Spa-Francorchamps, was unfortunately a first lap retirement on Sunday, with the Australian suffering damage to his steering system after making contact with both Carlos Sainz Jr. and the inside wall at turn one.
Stella, the Team Principal at McLaren, says to score as many points as they did across the weekend in Belgium was positive for the team, although they could have done better if they had found a much better set-up for the drivers for Sunday’s main event.
“After a positive Sprint event on Saturday, today in the race we have had some more difficulties,” said Stella. “With Oscar, unfortunately there was an incident in corner one, Oscar ran out of space, and he touched the wall, breaking the steering system and he needed to retire the car.
“On Lando’s side, we tried our best to stay in the points. We knew we were vulnerable in terms of top speed on the straights, and this was an issue in the race. However, thanks to the strategy and thanks to Lando driving exceptionally well while there was some rain, on new Softs, we could find some free air, exploit the pace of the car, and this led us to a good P7 finish.
“We are happy that we scored a good chunk of points over the weekend, it has been a very strong stint before the break. I would like to again thank the whole team for the exceptional work that led us to being competitive and scoring so many points in the last four races, and we can look positively at the races post-shutdown.”
