Andrea Stella isn’t dressing up McLaren’s prospects for Austria. After a bruising weekend in Barcelona, the team principal is effectively bracing his squad for another fight on unfamiliar terms at the Red Bull Ring — and he’s pointed the finger at the same two outfits that made McLaren look ordinary in Spain: Ferrari and Mercedes.
The mood around McLaren coming out of Barcelona is telling. Not panicked, not defeated, but acutely aware that the strengths baked into the MCL40’s current specification don’t automatically translate when the calendar swings to circuits that lean hard on traction, braking stability and low-speed rotation. Stella’s read is that Spielberg is more likely to underline those limitations than mask them.
Ferrari arrive with genuine momentum. Lewis Hamilton’s Barcelona win didn’t just add another line to his already absurd CV; it validated the step Ferrari has made with its latest upgrade package, rolled out two weeks ago and immediately reflected in the car’s balance and race pace. In the first phase of the season, it briefly looked as if McLaren had jumped into that “best of the rest” conversation — particularly when Oscar Piastri went to Japan and looked like he belonged in the fight for the win — but Monaco and Barcelona have dragged the narrative back towards red.
There’s a nuance in Stella’s assessment, though, and it’s where the Austrian weekend gets interesting. He doesn’t expect Ferrari’s strengths to evaporate in the Styrian hills — quite the opposite — but he’s also clearly wary of the Mercedes package being the more complete weapon over one lap.
“Austria is a slightly different circuit,” Stella said, contrasting it with Barcelona’s demands. In Spain, he pointed out, stability and the car’s behaviour through braking and turn-in are everything. Austria flips that emphasis: heavier straight-line braking events, corners that funnel into low-speed sections, and a rhythm that punishes any reluctance from the front end while asking the rear tyres to survive repeated traction zones.
That’s been the sore spot for McLaren lately. Barcelona exposed the broader deficit to Ferrari and Mercedes, and Monaco made the car’s low-speed cornering weakness impossible to ignore. The Red Bull Ring isn’t Monaco, but it’s not exactly a high-speed aero lab either; it’s a circuit where being “pretty good everywhere” isn’t enough if your competitors have a clear advantage in rotation or tyre use.
Stella was blunt about how he sees the pecking order shaping up.
“I would expect that Ferrari remains the faster car in the corners,” he said, “probably Mercedes over a single lap the best car overall, when the chassis and the power unit are both considered.”
That line — “when the chassis and the power unit are both considered” — is doing a lot of work. Stella is hinting at a familiar trade-off: Ferrari’s chassis platform looks strong and versatile right now, but he still expects Mercedes to carry an edge with the full package in Spielberg, particularly if the circuit tilts the lap-time equation towards power unit deployment and efficiency. If Ferrari can “win” the corners but loses too much on the straights, Austria could become a weekend where it’s quick without being dominant.
For McLaren, it sounds like a case of damage limitation and incremental progress rather than bold predictions. Stella’s framing is deliberately inward-looking: focus on their own update path, don’t get distracted by the noise, and accept that rivals will keep bringing upgrades too.
“We aim, for the coming races, to develop our car farther by bringing some upgrades,” he said, “but at the same time we are certain that our competitors will also have some upgrades… we want to look at our own trajectory.”
That’s the key phrase — trajectory. The subtext is that McLaren don’t believe they’ve suddenly “lost it”; they believe they’re on a development curve that simply hasn’t landed the right answers yet for this type of circuit. And in 2026, with the competitive order still sensitive to small swings in platform behaviour and tyre usage, the difference between a podium-capable car and a car stranded in the second group can be one area of performance that doesn’t travel.
Stella also flagged the possibility that Austria turns into one of those weekends where tyre management decides how much your Saturday matters. The Red Bull Ring has a habit of producing hot races and high degradation when the conditions line up, and it’s another area where McLaren want to be better.
“It could be another hot and high degradation weekend,” he said, “so it’s important also that we improve from a tyre exploitation point of view.”
It’s not a dramatic quote, but it’s a revealing one. When team principals start talking about “tyre exploitation” this pointedly, it usually means they know the raw pace isn’t enough to save them — and that they’re expecting strategy, management and execution to be the levers that keep them in the picture.
So while the spotlight will naturally follow Hamilton after Barcelona, and while Mercedes head to Austria with Stella himself effectively nominating them as the benchmark over a single lap, McLaren’s weekend may be defined by something more subtle: whether they can stop the circuit from poking at their weak points.
If they can’t, Austria could become less about chasing Ferrari and Mercedes, and more about ensuring this wobble doesn’t become a trend.
