Andrea Stella defends decision to stop its F1 2025 development in order to focus on 2026, as he explains the pro and cons of the situation.
With Red Bull still bringing certain updates which includes the ongoing weekend in Mexico, questions were raised to McLaren about it halting its development programme in order to focus on 2026. A certain section believed that the former lured the latter into false sense of relief.
Since McLaren looked unbeatable at halfway point, the team eventually decided to pull the plug on its 2025 programme to focus on 2026. The challenge from Red Bull didn’t seem forthcoming as such on the constructors’ side, which the Woking outfit sealed in Baku itself.
The drivers’ side seemed a distant thought as well considering Oscar Piastri built up a 104 points lead on Max Verstappen, before it started to dip. But team boss Stella doesn’t see it as a problem that Red Bull is still updating and that there is a genuine threat of them not winning the drivers’ title.
He noted how McLaren has limited resources on the CFD and windtunnel side after winning the F1 title in 2024. Due to the regulation in place, the team doesn’t have enough cycles to use. Additionally, Stella feels anymore work on the 2025 programme, would have compromised its 2026 plans.
He thinks Red Bull had some margin in their hand which they are exploiting now. “So the 2026 project would be heavily compromised,” said Stella to media on Friday. “We want to win championships in the future. To win championship in the future you need to have a competitive car. I think we have been very considerate in the timing of switching our full resources to 2026.
“We also have to make a technical point here. Our car from an aerodynamic point of view was already quite mature and to add one point of aerodynamic efficiency like we have added more than one point when we upgraded our car around Austria, Canada and so on. But it takes weeks for us to add one point of aerodynamic efficiency because we were at a plateau in our aerodynamic development.
“In the 2026 car every week we had a lot of downforce. So that’s where with the best information you have available you have to make a call. We also don’t have to forget that by being the champions we are the most restricted by the regulations in terms of the wind tunnel allowance and the CFD allowance. So it’s not like we have an unlimited amount of resources that we can use.
“So we need to be ponderate in the way we allocate resources this year to next year because it comes from the same pot when it comes to CFD and aerodynamic wind tunnel testing. And like I said before because we were so much in the diminishing returns we needed to be realistic and shift our attention to 2026.
“Also I think that when we look at Red Bull and when we consider some of the complaints they had at the start of the season perhaps they had more margin to develop efficiently focusing on 2025 and perhaps they are happier to give up a little bit of the 2026 because they might have some other issues for 2026 whereby they say let’s focus on 2025,” summed up Stella.
When pushed on if McLaren would have stopped development irrespective of Red Bull’s stance, Stella affirmed that was the case. He reiterated that the performance of their car mostly reached the tipping point and there was nothing more they could have done to make it faster.
For Red Bull, he feels they mostly fixed its problems faced early in the year rather than bringing proper development parts by compromising on anything. “Well it’s both, it’s exactly both, like when you work in a very efficient way in a Formula 1 team actually you blend your manpower with the methodologies the CFD and the wind tunnel such that none of them is actually a single limitation,” continued Stella.
“You blend your working ways in a way that they become a single limitation at the same time and that’s exactly what was the case for us. And not at all [that we would have changed anything had Red Bull peaked earlier] because it’s not like if I spend three weeks more on the 2025, I’m going to add one tenth of lap time. We were just plateaued. Actually to produce the upgrades that we took to the mid of the season it was a huge undertaking.
“We were like should we actually finalise because we were struggling to improve what was already a pretty mature project. So we should think that you have seen how many cars they actually attempted to develop and sometimes things were the opposite direction. This is because it’s very sophisticated aerodynamics. Maybe one day we can talk about like the specifics of the technicality and the difficulties of developing.
“I think it’s much easier to develop when you have some specific problems and I think for instance for Red Bull they talked at times of struggling to rebalance with the front wing when they were using big rear wings. Then it’s easier to find lap time because you are effectively fixing something rather than trying to improve something that already works well,” summed up Stella.
Here’s Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris and co on title scene
Here’s reactions on tapegate
