Stella sees "changes in the pecking order" as he believes McLaren's early advantage is gone

The British team made a superb start to the season, backing up their fine form shown in winter testing in Bahrain to take four out of the first five wins so far in the 2025 Formula 1 season.

However, their latest win at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, which saw Oscar Piastri take his third win of the season, highlighted that the pace advantage they had may be shrinking, with tyre management being a key factor.

Tyre management was McLaren's strongest point last season, and since the start of the current season, it has allowed them to stay ahead and dominate the rest of the grid. However, in Jeddah, the papaya-coloured team struggled in that regard.

In addition, it was evident that around the Jeddah Corniche Circuit, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc also knew how to handle their tyres well. After the race, Stella was faced with the fact that McLaren's major advantage in this area had diminished, with the Italian admitting that to the media..

“You are absolutely right,” Stella admitted to, among others, GPblog. “I think so far, and this is one of the few things that I actually admitted, we seem to have a good capability of interacting with the tyres in a gentle way, and we could produce a strong pace at the end of the stint. But, if we look at the first stint, today, Verstappen had the better pace at the end of stint one. Then Leclerc, I think he took it to another level with Oscar.

“In fairness, we pitted Oscar because that's what we had. He was starting to degrade to a point that it was a risk pitting ahead of Verstappen. So we needed to go. This was a little bit unexpected, because we thought that we could once again utilise this strong feature of the car,” continued the Italian.

As a result, McLaren were unable to rely less on the expected advantage in tyre management, which allowed the rest of the grid to close what was a sizeable gap in pace.

“But I think it just shows once again that, not only from a pace point of view, but we saw today from a tyre exploitation point of view, everything is so tight and close that there could be small variabilities associated to the tarmac characteristic, the way the tyres are being used, how the tyres are driven, and this changes the balance, it changes the pecking order,” Stella explained.

“So I think for us, the message is very clear, the margins are tight, and we need to execute race weekends in a perfect way if we want to continue this strong start to the season,” Stella concluded.