The director of the McLaren team, Andrea Stella, made her verdict on the Belgian Grand Prix Sprint race at SPA Franccoampsrevealing that cars have reached aerodynamic “maturity”. Thus, he pointed out that his team envisaged several strategies for the qualification session and the main race, suggesting that a victory remains in sight.
The Sprint race saw a tight battle between Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen, Lando Norris joining the party halfway. Piastri started in pole position after breaking the tour record on Friday, but Verstappen was quick to exceed it in the early stadiums.
The quadruple world champion kept his head while the clean air to come has played his advantage. Unfortunately for Piastri, he had to face the turbulent air, and given the nature of the circuit, he had trouble passing Verstappen, despite a constant gap of almost half a second.
Stella pointed out that on a circuit like SPA, the car behind is an advantage due to the long section which offers opponents a fairly good Slipstream. He said after the sprint race:
Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren and Andrea Stella, director of the McLaren Talk team at Park Ferme at the Japan F1 Grand Prix in the Suzuka circuit on April 06, 2025 in Suzuka, Japan.
Clive Rose / Getty images
“Well, it was a sprint where it did not go much apart from the situation in the first round, which is actually quite typical in the spa. Not necessarily, you want to be the first car leaving the corner one and which had to stay at full speed for 17 seconds – you become a little exposed to the car behind.
“So we saw this peculiarity today, then in all honesty, it was difficult to find the position not only because of the top speed, but because we could not remain close enough in the second sector.
“So, once again, it is a bit of a peculiarity of maturity that these cars have made from an aerodynamic point of view. Now the Slipstream effect is starting to be important.”
When asked if P2 and P3 would be good starting positions at SPA, Stella laughed, saying that the two main positions are the objective of qualification, but have not excluded other strategies that could play the advantage of the team. He said:
“Well, sometimes during the sprint, I thought in fact, what is the best position we want to qualify – P1, P2? Certainly, it will not be easy, but we will try, and I think that in the race, we must also remember that there are more options from a strategic point of view.
“The degradation of the tires will be more important, so we are certainly there to try to win this race. It was also encouraging to see that the two drivers seemed to have the pace today. I think that if we were in mind, we could have had the pace of opening a gap compared to the others. We are therefore impatient to qualify and the rest of the weekend.”