Source:REUTERS/ELOISA SANCHEZ
[Saba Sports News] According to GPBlog, McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has admitted that the team’s development work for the 2025 car hit a standstill earlier than expected. This decision opened the door for Max Verstappen’s strong counterattack in the second half of the season and reignited Red Bull’s championship hopes. When asked if they would have delayed shifting their development focus to the 2026 car had they known Red Bull and Verstappen would pose a threat in the Drivers’ Championship fight, Stella stated that the team had hit a bottleneck in extracting more lap time from the MCL39. Stella said: “Absolutely not, because even if I spent another three weeks on the 2025 car, I wouldn’t find one-tenth of a second. We had reached a bottleneck. Actually, developing the upgrade package we introduced mid-season was extremely difficult. We even considered abandoning it because improving a project that was already quite mature was just too challenging.” Stella further pointed out that other teams, in their attempts to find lap time, developed various “different cars,” only to lose performance when their upgrades failed. He added that the process was much easier for Red Bull, as they needed to solve specific problems with their car.