Stella upbeat after Austin: “We had the speed to win” as Verstappen tightens the screw
Max Verstappen left Austin with the big trophy and a fistful of points, but Andrea Stella walked out of Texas with something he values just as much: reassurance.
On a weekend that repeatedly knocked McLaren off balance, Stella’s takeaway was simple. Lando Norris had the pace to win the United States Grand Prix. He just didn’t have the clean air to use it.
Verstappen executed a tidy lights-to-flag from pole on Sunday, his job eased when Charles Leclerc muscled past Norris at Turn 1 and then clung on with the soft tyre offset. Norris eventually prised the Ferrari aside late on, but by then the Red Bull had the margin and the rhythm. The result capped a heavy-hitting stretch for Verstappen — three wins and two seconds from the last five — and trimmed the championship gaps to the McLaren pair at the top, with Oscar Piastri still leading, Norris next, and Verstappen now looming into range.
Stella wasn’t waving any panic flags. If anything, he sounded encouraged.
“Take the scrap with Charles out of it and Lando’s speed stacks up with Max,” he said post‑race. “On a one‑stop, passing on track is king. We didn’t have many levers to pull strategically once we were pinned behind the Ferrari. But the raw performance? That’s where I’m reassured.”
You could see why. Every time Norris found clear track, his sectors mirrored the leader’s. The problem was getting there. And McLaren never fully recovered from a scrappy Saturday that left them blind.
Both orange cars were wiped out of Sprint contention in a first‑lap tangle, taking away the most valuable thing COTA offers in 2025: live setup references. Ferrari and Red Bull found gains from Sprint to Grand Prix. McLaren, stuck on the sidelines, had to guess.
“Not running the Sprint put us on the back foot with set‑up,” Stella admitted. “Looking back, there was more in the car we couldn’t extract without that learning.”
There’s no silver bullet coming, either. Red Bull’s RB21 has crept forward with a suite of small-but-constant refinements in recent rounds. McLaren, by contrast, is shutting the development drawer until the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi.
“There will be no new parts for the rest of the season,” Stella confirmed. No late‑game upgrade gambles, no throwback to an older spec. The fight will be won with execution, not fresh carbon.
That’s where Austin bit hardest. The Circuit of The Americas’ ripples and scars demand a delicate compromise on ride height — low enough to unlock downforce, high enough to keep the plank intact. Get it wrong and the stewards do the job for you. After famous DSQs in past years for excessive wear, McLaren ran conservatively. Without Sprint data, there was no appetite to “nail the last millimetre,” as Stella put it.
“Simulation gets you close, but not all the way. You need track data to commit,” he said. “At COTA, we left a little on the table.”
None of that dims what this title fight has become: tense, tactical, and suddenly very tight. Verstappen’s momentum is the headline — 119 points from a possible 133 in the last five weekends — and he’s chipping into both McLaren drivers as the calendar turns for the final run. According to the latest picture, the Dutchman cut his deficit to Piastri to 40 points, and to Norris to 26, with five race weekends left.
Pressure, then? In Woking, it looks more like familiarity. Stella’s CV includes high‑stakes Sundays with Michael Schumacher, Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso. He knows what championship weather feels like.
“The key is to keep intensity high and stress low,” he said. “This — tight, hard racing for wins and the title — is what Formula 1 is supposed to be. If anything, the weekends where we were cruising to P1‑P2 were the anomaly.”
So McLaren heads to the next round with a clear brief: clean weekends, sharper execution, smarter track‑limits on setup, and trust in a car that continues to be a match for anything over a race stint. The margin for error? Almost gone. The belief? Very much intact.
“We keep doing the good work and the results will follow,” Stella said. And on the evidence from Austin, he’s got a point. Norris had the pace to make life very uncomfortable for Verstappen. Give him the clear air next time, and we might just see how uncomfortable.
