McLaren left 'surprised' by Red Bull's overnight decline in Miami

While the McLarens had confident pace throughout the Grand Prix, in qualifying however, Max Verstappen claimed pole position. According to team principal, that was also down to the fact that on Saturday, Verstappen managed to keep his tyres alive better.

Roles switched on Sunday, with then the Woking-based team's cars being able to keep the Pirellis in the optimal window better. "Yes, I'm a little surprised that the gap we had today is as big as we saw. I thought that we could have had an advantage from tyre management point of view, but I didn't think tyre management advantage would lead to this level of gap throughout the race," Stella began to GPblog among others after Oscar Piastri's victory.

Stella explained that in his verdict a day ago, he talked about Qualifying. According to the Italian, it is difficult to for his team to push their car to the limit with new tyres and an empty fuel tank.

"I want to go back to saying that the’s the result of some very targeted engineering work. If you had asked me before the season I would say like, yes, we have invested in improving the interaction with the tyres but I wouldn't have said that the extent would have been the one that we see in this kind of races," he concluded.