McLaren celebrated second and third at Monza – but did a win get away?

McLaren Formula 1 team principal Andrea Stella says that Ferrari was just as quick in Monza – and that a victory for the Woking team would have been far from clear cut.

Charles Leclerc won the Italian GP by sticking to a one-stop and inheriting the lead after Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris pitted for a second time.

Piastri came close to catching the Ferrari driver on his fresh tyres, but just missed out.

While the race has been widely considered as a missed opportunity and strategic mistake by McLaren given the pace of the papaya cars Stella insisted that it was not that straightforward.

“In terms of the race today, I think there may be a misunderstanding that the McLaren was by far the fastest car,” he said.

“I think Leclerc was as fast as McLaren today, because he could stay with Oscar in the first stint. And normally, when you have the dirty air and you can stay with the race leader, it means that you are at least as fast as the race leader.

“This normally leads to some more degradation, like then Leclerc had in the final bit of the first stint.

“And even in the second stint, he was behind the two McLarens, and still he could stay with the McLarens. And even if you look at the practice and the qualifying, I think lap times were essentially within the noise of putting together laps.”

Stella managed to draw positives from Ferrari’s pace:  “I think Ferrari at this weekend, they were as competitive as us, at least with McLaren, which for us, is somehow bad news, because it meant that we couldn’t simply cruise in the race. We needed to deal with them, and they did a good job in exploiting some of their strengths.

“But at the same time, it’s good news because we have more cars that can take points away off Red Bull.

“I think this is better news for us, and we need to make sure that we maximise the potential that is available in the car, even if it means that in this kind of circuits, Ferrari will set a very, very serious challenge for the victory.”

Stella acknowledged that Piastri could have won the race: “Especially with Oscar after the stop, if we had driven the car to say, like we drive before a one-stop, even if we see the graining on the hard tyres, we don’t get too worried, and we just simply trying to respond to Leclerc, then I think the victory could have been possible.

“The thing is, you go into some of the variations in terms of how much you use the front tyres from car-to-car. And I think our car traditionally tends to be very good on the rear tyres, but when we deal with front graining, we tend to be on the aggressive side. 

“So this made us a bit nervous, especially after Lando had a lock-up on the front left a couple of laps before, which for us, normally would have been the symptom that the tyres were starting to struggle.

“But in hindsight, I think there wasn’t enough degradation for Leclerc for us to go and beat him on a two-stop, because we missed a couple of laps. But a couple of laps is a lot.

“So it remains a question mark whether we could have won the race or not. But it looks like there was potentially more in the tyres than what we might have anticipated.

“Probably everyone entered the race with doubts as to the tyres, because nobody runs the hard tyres. And when you are P3, it’s easier to say let me try the one-stop than when you have the lead.”