Amidst Red Bull's supicions, Stella praises McLaren's 'controversial' cooling capabilites

01:59, 05 May

byNorberto Mujica

That McLaren won the Miami Grand Prix in dominant fashion, was not a surprise to anyone, and team boss Andrea Stella has clear insight into what made such a crushing win possible.

The dominance of the McLaren cars did not come from out of the blue, of course, and Stella highlights the engineering behind the built and the design of the MCL39, that made the win in Miami - by such margins - possible.

"Whenever the conditions are challenging for the tyres in terms of overheating in particular, then the car seems to be doing a good job on keeping the tyres in a very good window and the car is gentle on the tyres."

"There's very good engineering behind this, we have looked holistically at all the characteristics that you can have in a car that influence the behaviour of the tyres."

Stella's comments come in the midst of a behind-the-scenes battle brewing between Red Bull and McLaren over the Woking-based team's abilities to keep their tyres from degrading even under such high temperatures as the grid faced in Miami, for instance.

McLaren's engineers responsible for dominant Miami win

Stella then praised the work done by the technical staff at McLaren, for the way they have gotten on top of the highly complex Pirelli tyres.

Thanks to them, Stella believes: "[It] is practical to actually cash in this kind of benefit and then master one of the matters that still in Formula One looks like it's a little bit of a black art which is dealing with tyres."

Then Stella addressed the car's cooling system, pinpointing yet another performance differentiator that played a major role in today's win.

"I would say especially when it's hot there's another characteristic which I think works very well with our car, which is the cooling system."

"I think when it's hot, our car, you can see that it's relatively closed from a bodywork point of view because there's been also great engineering going into the cooling system car layout."

"So I think in these conditions, we see that the excellence of the engineering at McLaren has reached a point where it can make the difference to this kind of extent."