Stella believes McLaren can still target Monza podium – ‘but we have to be smart’

Given that the team won the previous two races at the Hungaroring and Zandvoort, McLaren can hardly be satisfied with the outcome of a Monza Q3 session that left Oscar Piastri sixth on the grid and Lando Norris eighth.

The result was not representative of the car’s potential – Piastri initially qualified third before receiving a three-place grid penalty for impeding Liam Lawson in Q2 – and, despite the shortcomings of the MCL40 package, there remains potential to move forward in Sunday’s race.

That is the view of Team Principal Andrea Stella, who is taking a glass-half-full approach.

“Cars are very close to one another, so it's difficult for me to make a prediction for tomorrow,” he said on Saturday evening. “I think, in general, we should be able to compete for podiums, but we will have to be smart from a driving point of view, from an energy usage point of view, and from a strategic point of view.

“So there's certainly many variables, not necessarily all the ones that were relevant in Qualifying, but some of them yes, like actually being in a slipstream. We saw that in practice, for instance.”

So, what went wrong in Qualifying? As Stella explained, it was a question of suboptimal execution. That included Piastri’s costly impeding incident, which occurred as he left the pit lane towards the end of Q2, while Norris also highlighted issues with the brakes.

The frustration for McLaren was that both cars showed strong pace, with Piastri and Norris finishing second and third respectively in Q2.

“At times we executed well from a performance point of view,” said Stella. “Like in Q2, we had the two cars P1, P2, then they ended up P2, P3 at the end of Q2 because the cars were positioned in the right place in terms of slipstream, and both Oscar and Lando drove the cars very well despite the small gaps to the cars ahead.

“But yet in Q2 we managed to do an impeding. From an execution point of view, which is the wider aspect of going racing – which is not only pure car speed, there are several factors – and in Q2 we had this factor related to the impeding. Yet, performance seems to be competitive.

“We go in Q3. I think both cars in the first attempt were positioned well from a slipstream point of view. Probably Lando had too big a gap to the car ahead, I don't remember very well, but he loses some time in some corners. So in terms of execution, again, we leave some performance behind, while I think Oscar did a very good lap.”

Piastri’s first effort was good enough for third at that stage of the session. However, it was on the final run – when the McLarens were first out of the pit lane to avoid ending up at the back of the queue and potentially missing their laps – that things went awry.

“We had some issues managing the battery, and here in Monza, every 1% in the battery charge costs you a significant amount of milliseconds, and then we had the issue with Oscar locking corner one.

“So I think overall there's multiple areas in which we have not executed at the level that we should have, because in Monza, which is so peculiar, position of the car on track is as important as the underlying car performance, and also the management of the power unit and the brakes is once again as important as these other factors. So there was more that we could have achieved.”

Stella stressed that the car’s strong form at times at a circuit where straight-line performance is crucial gave the team encouragement.

“Actually, considering the process of setting up the car, optimization, chassis, driving, power unit, I think during Qualifying we saw that we had achieved a relatively competitive position,” he noted. “And like I referred to before, I think if we had done a better job of execution, had control of some parameters that don't only depend on the pure performance of the car, we could have definitely qualified, I would say, within the first couple of rows on the grid.

“So it's almost a half-pass from a performance point of view in terms of Monza being an exam that we wanted to use to test the performance of the MCL40.”

How that performance translates into race pace remains to be seen, but Stella is upbeat.

“Some of the factors that held us back today, I think, are not relevant tomorrow,” he said. “Like the slipstream, or the positioning on the car on track, or to some extent the brakes.

“It will be I think a very interesting race. Actually I am not sure that it's easy to think how it will unfold because it's a race in which if you start to play with the boost and overtake cars, you may get overtaken and you may start to lose overall time in the race.

“But at the same time, if you're faster, you may want to pass. Once again, I think being close to the car ahead will make you fast, and if you pass, you may be slower than you were after the car. It will be very interesting.”