McLaren 'very close' to Red Bull but needs high-speed gains

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes that the MCL38 has very similar pace to the championship-leading Red Bull, but that they still need to improve performance in high-speed track sections.

Lando Norris scooped Max Verstappen to pole position in Barcelona but lost out to his rival at the first corner. Although he charged back into contention in the latter stages, he eventually had to settle for second.

In the race before that, Norris looked set for victory only for the unfortunate timing of a safety car catching the team out and allowing Verstappen to take victory - the opposite of what had happened in Miami.

On such small details do races and whole seasons turn, but Stella is of the opinion that underneath the race-by-race explanations, to win consistently the team must work on the performance of the car through high-speed corners.

“I think the race pace was very, very similar,” Stella said when reviewing what had happened in Spain. “Very, very similar. The two cars are very, very close.

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"In Canada the difference in qualifying was 20 milliseconds, [in Spain] it was again a few milliseconds and very similar in the race. That's a great achievement for McLaren.

"Think how this interview would have been 12 months ago! So now we talk about being on par with Red Bull - but we want to keep improving the car.

"The fact that we were faster at the end [of last week's race] is because we had fresher tyres," he explained. "The fact that he was faster at the start is because we were behind [George] Russell [after the first corner].

“[Otherwise] it would almost look like the great balance of performance that we had in qualifying, parity of performance," he said. “Almost like it transferred into the race.

"Normally you have some variations as a function of how you interact with the tyres," he continued. “But actually, [in Spain] I think it was very similar.

"On a track that is so demanding on tyres, so demanding on aerodynamics, I think that’s really good news for the progress that we have made with the performance of the car.”

Stella said that the changes introduced to the car in Miami had made a fundamental change to the way that it behaves, shifting the emphasis to tackling long-standing issues with low-speed performance.

But that inevitably comes with consequences, and Stella admitted that this meant the team hadn't been able to bring along the high -speed nature of the car as much as Red Bull and other rivals.

"There are some sections of the car that don’t necessarily fit the characteristics we have now,” he acknowledged. “There are some others that will fit.

"If we look at the second sector [in Spain] we’ve been very competitive all weekend, and this is again witnessing the improvement we have made in the medium and low speed [corners].

"But we have some work to do actually now in high speed," he admitted, “like we have discussed in previous events which were mainly low-speed dominated.

"We’ve been able to alter the personality of the car, now it’s a car that works well in a speed range which 12 months ago was our weakness, but with this generation of cars you gain somewhere, you lose a little bit somewhere else.

“It’s like we didn’t improve [high speed performance] as much as we did some other areas, and some other people did," he suggested. "Certainly Red Bull, they are very good in high and very high speed.

"It’s not like we made high speed worse," he added. "You just have to continue your development and make sure. But we do have to keep the trajectory up.

“It's not obvious, it requires a lot of work, it requires to keep evolving what we know about the car so that you can keep improving it. But people at McLaren are very committed so I'm optimistic for the future.”

"McLaren is just doing a really, really good job," was the view from Verstappen on the fierce development race currently raging in 2024. They have brought a lot of good updates to their car, and it really just seems to work..

"From our side, we have brought things to the car, but probably not as much lap time as what others have been bringing to their car so now it's up to us to try and find a bit more, try to get that little jump ahead again."

Verstappen acknowledged that the Red Bull technical team also has a lot on its to-do list right now. "We just lacked a bit of that outright pace [in Spain]," he conceded this week.

"Just when we had to push we just couldn't look after the tyres like Lando could," he said. "These kind of things are quite crucial on most of the tracks where you have a bit of deg so we need to try and be better on that.”

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