The second race of the season and the second consecutive victory for McLaren, who after Lando Norris’ win in Australia triumphed this time with Oscar Piastri in China. A very positive weekend for the Woking team, who, unlike last week, also achieved a double podium, much to the delight of Team Principal Andrea Stella.
Strategy in Sprint qualifying
However, analyzing the development of the Chinese GP on Sky Sport F1, the Umbrian engineer highlighted the team’s growth after a challenging start between qualifying and the Sprint race, after which changes were necessary: “In the two laps with the soft tires in Sprint qualifying, we wanted to be very conservative and have two attempts because we weren’t confident we could do a clean single lap – he explained – so we wanted to have two attempts in which the tires could almost repeat the lap time even though they had been used for one lap, and that’s why we thought of using this strategy. I have to say that even the two laps weren’t enough because, if we look at Lando in his second attempt, he was on track for pole position, but there was still an imperfection that didn’t allow us to set a good time. We know the car isn’t the easiest to drive with new tires, and I also have to say that on the first day here we had some issues with tire interaction and balance.”
Sprint race experience
Qualifying and the Sprint race, which, as Stella reiterated, pushed the team to make changes to the MCL39 in preparation for Saturday’s qualifying and the main race, which ended with positive results for the Woking team: “We had to assess the situation in qualifying and the Sprint race, and from there we learned a lot by making changes to the car and driving style. Both drivers understood that they couldn’t drive the car the way we did in Australia, so there was an adjustment, and I’m very happy with the results from this work of adaptation both from the team and the drivers for qualifying and the race.”
Balanced F1
Changes that allowed McLaren to take a significant step forward in terms of competition, in a race where the team also got the strategies right to maintain the top two positions in the standings: “In this weekend’s Sprint, I’m not sure we had any advantage. Ferrari was superior. After these adjustments, though, we managed to recover some performance, but in both qualifying and the race, we didn’t have more than a couple of tenths. This means we pushed throughout the race, but not at maximum because of tire management, especially after putting on the hard tires. We were waiting to see how they behaved and we were uncertain. We were watching Stroll a lot, who was out on the hard tires, to see if one stop would be enough. We were uncertain, like everyone else, and this was a reason to control our competitiveness, our pace, but not much – he concluded – I don’t think there was much difference between McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, and then, as we saw with Max Verstappen at the end, even Red Bull. It confirms the trend of a very balanced Formula 1 where sometimes these adjustments make the difference.”
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