Andrea Stella admits Oscar Piastri pit stop issue was ‘costly’ in Belgium as he identifies two factors that surprised McLaren

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Andrea Stella admits Oscar Piastri pit stop issue was ‘costly’ in Belgium as he identifies two factors that surprised McLaren


“In terms of could we [have pitted Piastri once], yes, in hindsight,” Stella responded. “We considered that. We were not adamant that that was going to work. In case this kind of strategy doesn’t work, it can become very, very painful because then it’s too late to pit and therefore you may lose a lot of positions.

“I think for us, if anything, this one was pretty extreme, I think, in terms of considering this because if you commit to this and it doesn’t work, you will probably screw up a race day. With Oscar we thought we had strong pace and we were in condition to use a more conventional stop to cover positions.

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“I think the two factors that today were different from our initial expectations were the degradation of the tyres was lower than expected, but if anything and above all, overtaking was more difficult.

“That surprised us and when you had a bit of tyre advantage it was still not enough to overtake because, like we saw with Lewis and Russell, I don’t think the positions were frozen, that’s what I understood that simply with the effect of the dirty air it was just not possible to overtake as easily as we thought.

“I think in Russell’s position, there was potentially more motivation to take a risky approach. But for us we want to think slightly more robustly, and we see today we scored again higher than Red Bull. We’re now 43 points behind, I think we need to be a little cautious with adventurous strategies, which with hindsight today actually proved to be good.”



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Publish date : 2024-07-30 16:23:48

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