Stella has words of caution for Norris in his praises to Piastri

20:28, 16 May

byNorberto Mujica

Andrea Stella, McLaren team principal, judges Oscar Piastri's elevated performance, when compared to his 2024 season, and knows where the Australian has taken a step forward.

Speaking in the team representatives' press conferences to media like GPblog, Stella was asked in which areas he felt Piastri had improved ahead of this season. "Well, I think the most important improvement, if anything, is that Oscar has become a faster driver," Stella said.

"I think when you are a faster driver, then you have more opportunity to process, more time to process, more bandwidth to process things. And this is true when you are in the car, and this is also true when you are outside the car."

"Because, like, the speed is there, let's process all the other marginal gains that will then at the end of the week constitute the performance that you need to have that kind of results that he's having at the moment."

Piastri's performance a result of a holistic approach

However, Piastri's own work, and that of the McLaren team around him as well, to strengthen his weak points is something Stella also takes into consideration.

"In addition to that, over the winter there's been a very specific amount of work that has gone, has paid attention at different areas, has been quite holistic."

"And while Oscar is definitely the main one to praise for these developments, I would like to mention the team around Oscar, his engineers and all the support from the factory with all the analysis."

"And even the team, Mark Webber that works with Oscar and is definitely a great source of thoughts, insights and identification of opportunities," added Stella recognising the impact the former F1 driver has had on the championship leader.

"So there's quite a lot of work behind these insights and identification of opportunities, behind this progress. But ultimately hats off to Oscar that has been able to capitalise."

Read also

Piastri dominated Friday at Imola and now looks towards the final practice session, qualifying and the Grand Prix on Sunday to capitalise on the performance show in FP1 and FP2, where his teammate Lando Norris failed to beat him even in on single session.