“Today, it looks like we lost this battle, but we are working hard so that we will be equipped in the near future to be more competitive,” Stella told F1 Nation following events at Suzuka. “I would say Ferrari, definitely, they are not far ahead.
“I think it will be definitely a battle of development this year because these cars still offer quite a lot of performance through development. I would say this is the main objective for us.
“It’s good to see that it’s just a few tenths that they are better than us. In a track like this, where you have high degradation, easy overtaking to some extent, then it’s difficult to keep faster cars behind, even if we have had a very strong qualifying. This means that the cars pretty much finished in the competitiveness order.”
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He continued: “Our expectations were definitely that we could have finished on the podium. We did try to finish on the podium because we stopped early with Lando to make sure that we retained the track position, but ultimately we didn’t have enough pace to retain the track position – especially Carlos, he could stay out, gain some laps on his tyres and then he could go through Lando and overtake with no problems.
“We were hoping for a podium, ultimately we discovered in the race that it wasn’t possible, but like I say, it’s not far. Hopefully soon we will have some developments that will make this much more possible.
“We should have a good round of developments in Miami. Even if it’s a Sprint event, we will definitely attempt to deploy them. Then we should have at least one, if not two, more rounds of development over this season.”
News Summary:
- Andrea Stella insists McLaren can think about winning races in 2024 with Ferrari ‘not far ahead’
- Check all news and articles from the latest Cricket updates.