'Apples, pears, and peaches': Stella’s fruity take on McLaren’s form

Andrea Stella, McLaren’s team principal, has a knack for keeping things juicy, dismissing comparisons between his team’s dominant Miami Grand Prix and their Imola showing as like mixing “apples and pears.”

With a schoolteacher’s wisdom and a strategist’s precision, Stella insists McLaren’s performance is track-specific, not a dip in form.

As Formula 1 takes on the Monaco Grand Prix, he’s dubbing the iconic street circuit a “peach”—a unique challenge that could shake up the pecking order.

With McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris leading the 2025 charge, Stella’s fruity analogies reveal a deeper truth about F1’s technical battles.

Apples, Pears, and Circuit Realities

Stella sharply rebuffed suggestions that McLaren underperformed in Imola, where Piastri took pole but Max Verstappen’s Red Bull comprehensively outpaced team papaya in the race.

“I am in disagreement with this statement. I think there's a tendency to compare apples and pears,” he said.

“When I was at school the teacher always said don't compare apples and pears [oranges, sic]. Make sure you are specific, analytical, precise in how you use information.”

He argued Imola’s high-speed corners and narrow layout align it with tracks like Saudi Arabia and Japan, where Red Bull historically dominated.

“Imola belongs to the category of tracks like Saudi Arabia and Japan; high-speed corners, narrow tracks and if we look at those circuits' pole position it was Red Bull,” he said.

“And in the race in Saudi, if it hadn’t been for the penalty for Max, Max would have won the race.”

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Contrastingly, Miami’s low-speed corners played to McLaren’s strengths, thanks to their aerodynamic upgrades.

“If we look at the pace between McLaren and Red Bull in Japan and in Saudi, for me the picture is very consistent with the picture we had in Imola,” Stella continued.

“But if we compare the race in Imola with the race in Miami, we are comparing an apple with a pear, and my school teacher would grab my ear and say, ‘don’t compare apple and pears’”.

He pointed to China, where McLaren struggled, and Bahrain, where they excelled, to underline how circuit characteristics dictate outcomes.

“Miami is a low-speed dominated circuit and with all the aerodynamic investment we have done, our car has improved massively in these low-speed corners.”

Dodging Bait and Eyeing Monaco’s Peach

Stella suggested Red Bull might simply be hyping McLaren’s form to pile on pressure.

“If we compare the circuits that belong to the apple and the circuits that belong to the pears, I think you can derive your own implications in terms of where the factual assessment from a technical point of view is,” he said.

“F1 is a technical business but obviously some people are good at dropping baits here and there, moving away from the technical facts. It’s up to you to take the bait, let me say.”

For Stella, Monaco is a different fruit entirely. “This one is a peach. This one is a complete one-off. I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, Ferrari is the lead car, so we will see,” he mused, hinting at a potential edge for the Scuderia.

“Maybe we do a few more races and we create some better, exact categories. I’m very curious to see whether for instance Baku will be a pear or a peach, I suspect it’s a peach, so we may continue this trend.”

As Monaco looms, Stella’s ready to savor the peach.

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