Stella confident Piastri inexperience won't hold McLaren back

New McLaren team principal Andrea Stella is sure that having a rookie driver in the team's line-up won't prove to be a problem for the squad in 2023.

The team slipped to fifth place in last year's constructors championship, in large part because of Daniel Ricciardo's faltering form in the MCL36 that failed to match the performance of his young team mate Lando Norris.

The team decided to axe Ricciardo a year before the end of his existing contract with McLaren, and signed up former Formula 2 champion Oscar Piastri to take over in 2023.

• Read also: McLaren's Stella reveals learnings from Ferrari bosses

But inevitably, his rookie status and lack of Formula 1 experience will make it a tough season for Piastri, and the concern is that Norris will once again be left to shoulder the load in terms of achieving results and points.

Piastri's lack of experience in F1 could also impact the team's technical development, with Piastri unable to offer the team the sort of context and insight that Ricciardo could with years of competing at the top level of F1.

However, Stella - who took over as team boss before Christmas after Andreas Seidl departed to become head of the Sauber team, which currently operates the Alfa Romeo entry - thinks not.

"I think the important point is to have continuity with Lando," Stella suggested. "He keeps the kind of reference,"

"It's a reference that we know very well, because we have gone through the development of Lando together with him.

"There has certainly been a development from a technical point of view - from a driving point of view, race craft point of view - so I think we know this very well.

"It will become a frame of reference for Oscar as well," Stella explained. "And this is in terms of not only Oscar's performance himself, but also understanding the car."

After being pipped by 14 points by Alpine in last year's team standings, Stella is focused on regaining the 'best of the rest' status for McLaren this year behind the big three teams.

"We will have a new car," he said. "We want to improve some of the things and drivers are certainly important in relation to that, even though F1, - unlike some other sports - relies a lot on numbers.

"We are lucky as [we have top] people dealing with that," he pointed out. "If you give me good numbers, I will take it, even if we don't have very clear references from the drivers.

"If it was a motorbike it would be more difficult to understand what is the role of the rider here, what is the role of the bike?" he continued. "But in F1, you pretty much get a very good idea from the numbers, what your competitiveness is.

"With the drivers you deal with subtleties, the final percentage of your performance, so I wouldn't be too worried."

Stella is confident that Piastri will be a quick learner and rapidly get up to a competitive level once he's had the chance to take this year's car out on track for the first time next month in Bahrain.

"He's certainly very talented," he commented about the 21-year-old from Melbourne, Australia. "We want him to use his references, references from the car, references even from what we learned with Daniel, and so on.

"We are quite adamant that he will have enough talent, process, intelligence to kind of find his own way, taking advantage of these references," he insisted.

"I'm not very concerned at all that we may lose this kind of experience in terms of comparison."

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