F1 News
Stella: 'We are in the Max Verstappen era'
While celebrations at Red Bull Racing could get underway, McLaren have now officially missed out on one title. The Woking-based team lead in the constructors' championship, but Lando Norris can no longer win in the drivers' standings this year. Team principal Andrea Stella reacted to Max Verstappen's fourth title, and also praised his British driver.
Talking to the press following the Las Vegas GP, including GPblog, the Italian team principal first began with congratulating the Dutch driver. "I will comment on Max in relation to our season, but please before I do so let me express my congratulations to Max Verstappen, four World Championships in a row. I think this title confirms that Max is one of the best drivers in the history of Formula One," Stella began.
"It's almost an important one for him, because possibly in the past like last year, people might have thought that it's easy to win races when you have the best car, but it's never easy to win so consistently. There's always so many reasons why things can go wrong."
According to Stella, this is now the 'Max Verstappen era' in the competition. "Already last year they were operating, driver and team, at very high level. This year, when often he didn't have the best car, but what he could extract from weekends in which he didn't have the best material confirms that we are in the era of Max Verstappen in this few last years. He deserves what he is achieving."
Stella reflects on McLaren's and Norris' performance
Of course as a driver celebrates, their title rival is left disappointed. Still, Stella sees the positives. "If we remove the first few races of the season before we delivered the Miami upgrades, then we see that we have a trajectory from a drivers championship point-of-view that means that Lando could compete with Max. This is one of the unthinkable achievements that we have to positively acknowledge at McLaren. When I say unthinkable, I'm thinking of where we were only 18 months ago."
"We have also learned that sometimes competing to win races, you need to adjust the way you approach racing. This season we have had some situations like Canada, Silverstone, in which we could have won the race, or Monza. We got important learning as a team."
Stella could also only praise Lando Norris "If we look at Lando's adaptations of competing even wheel-to-wheel with Max, I think from where he was in Austria to where he was in Austin. Just the week after in Mexico, he learned so quickly. I'm very proud of how rapidly Lando is picking up from the situations that he experiences on track, and to some extent even off track, to become a better and better driver."
He added: "I think with Lando, I'm not sure this is acknowledged enough externally. For some reasons, there's more acknowledgement towards what are the missed opportunities, rather than recognizing that Lando is in an extremely strong trajectory. He was in condition once McLaren offered material that can win races to keep the pace of Verstappen."
The team principal then also talked about Oscar Piastri as well. "Obviously we are working hard with Oscar. We are using even some of the learning with Lando to transfer on to Oscar because we want to be in condition in 2025 to compete for the driver championship with two drivers, Lando and Oscar."
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