Andrea Stella claims McLaren's deficit to Ferrari and Mercedes around half a second
F1 NewsThursday, 09 July 2026 at 09:06
Lando Norris may have finished on the Sprint Race podium in Silverstone and fourth in the Grand Prix, but McLaren boss Andrea Stella is under no illusions, claiming the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari is in the region of half a second.
While Norris had his own grandstand at Silverstone and McLaren were running a one-off livery, there was not much to celebrate for the reigning Formula 1 Champions after the dust settled following the British Grand Prix.
Stella said: “Overall the race confirmed that our performance today was in line with Qualifying. So we still exhibit a decent gap to Ferrari and Mercedes—probably around half a second.
“P4, I think it's an overachievement, not on our own merit. It's more because other people had trouble," he added of Norris' result while Oscar Piastri suffered car damage after contact at the start and couldn't recover higher than 11th.
McLaren are apparently paying the price of continuous car development in 2025 when Max Verstappen challenged Norris till the last race.
“Definitely,” Stella responded when asked if that was the case. “I would say that having been in the championship so tight with Red Bull and Verstappen in particular in the drivers’, we needed some of our attention in terms of keeping working on the car.
“Even if we didn't bring big upgrades, definitely we needed to keep paying attention from a technical point of view to the MCL39. We needed to ensure that we maximized our performance race-by-race, because the challenge from Verstappen was becoming more and more material," he explained.
McLaren paying the price of 2025 success
As for the development of McLaren's current challenger, the MCL40, the Italian admitted the team has gone down a wrong path.
He added: “During the development, I think we adopted some directions from a conceptual point of view that, as we learn more about the 2026 regulations, I would say that we are redirecting.
“And this, like everything, especially from an aerodynamic point of view, is not something that you can get to converge in the space of a week. It normally takes one or two months, and I think this couple of months is the delay that we have at the moment.
“And we see that it is probably two, three months, the space between which we see upgrades from the top teams.
“So I think that's what we believe—we have now a clear direction in terms of development. But it takes in some areas of the car—or it took—a couple of months to get it to be realized.
“So we should see in Hungary the first results of this approach, and then hopefully more and more upgrades for the rest of the season," Stella said.
When will there be improvement?
As for the timeline being targeted for McLaren's improvements, Stella revealed: “My ideal trajectory at the moment is that we would like to close the gap with the next round of upgrades that will happen across the shutdown. With something happening before and something happening after the shutdown.
“I think because we have kind of cleared our ideas as to which are the directions to follow in terms of aerodynamic development, we see now that the development is more sustained than what we had in some phases last year while defining the launch specification.
“But in my trajectory, I think we are going to close the gap with another step of upgrades, so ideally we will be able to deliver upgrades in the short term and upgrades in the mid term.
"Hopefully by then the others have not disappeared too far in front in the championship," the McLaren Team Principal concluded. (Reporting by Agnes Carlier)
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