Pressure builds on Red Bull; Stella delivers warning to McLaren's rivals

Warning for Red Bull

Andrea Stella has sent a warning to McLaren's title rivals. He reaffirmed after Sunday's Dutch Grand Prix that his team want to replicate what Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel did in 2013 when they won nine consecutive races to help Vettel on the way to his fourth world title. "We need to keep the focus," Stella admitted; "We need to think this is possible. I have to say today is very encouraging from a performance point of view. At the same time, it happens at a track, like we said yesterday, that seems to be just very suitable for our car like Hungary was.

"Even after Hungary, we said, it was going to be P1, or P2 every race, but it's not. It just seems to be very track-dependent at the moment. But today was definitely beyond expectation, including yesterday, in terms of qualifying performance. In terms of race performance, and to some extent even the tyre degradation was very good, to the point that Lando scored the fastest lap of the race at the last lap," the Italian concluded. 

Stella, who has been team principal at McLaren since Andreas Seidl's departure in 2022, went further and said that whilst tracks like Silverstone and Austria will give the advantage to Red Bull, the upgrades brought to the MCL38 will "be more competitive, even where Red Bull was faster than us, potentially. But we think that the car in the current configuration is possibly not enough in terms of the performance required to be the best car at every single event. That's why we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season."

McLaren now sit just 30 points behind Red Bull in the World Constructors Championship, whilst Norris has closed the gap to Verstappen to 70 points.