Stella admits to McLaren worries over Verstappen’s F1 Spanish GP three-stop strategy

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella admitted that Max Verstappen’s three-stop strategy at the Spanish Grand Prix had the team worried, having initially believed the four-time Formula 1 champion’s approach was “not going to be a problem”.

Verstappen made his first stop at the end of the 13th lap, trading his softs for an identical set – given the timing, it was understood by McLaren that the Dutchman would be three-stopping.

Lando Norris had just dispatched the Red Bull driver for second, but Verstappen’s pace ensured that he was over five seconds ahead of Oscar Piastri when the polesitter pitted from the lead at the end of lap 22.

After switching to mediums, Verstappen’s pace continued to build and he eroded much of McLaren’s advantage at the front – getting to around four seconds behind both Piastri and Lando Norris prior to pitting for a third time.

This prompted McLaren to respond, first with Norris to cover Verstappen off on lap 48, then with Piastri on the following lap. Although Verstappen tried to ladle the pressure on Norris once the pitstop cycle had ended, the Briton managed to find enough pace on his final set of softs to keep the Red Bull at bay.

“When we saw Verstappen stopping, we thought it would be a three-stopper – and we thought it’s not going to be a problem because we have already overtaken him on track,” Stella explained.

“We thought we should have a decent pace advantage. But the reality is that he was fast. He was fast and when we went on the medium tyres in the second stint, we were pushing, controlling the pace and he was catching up very rapidly. More rapidly than we hoped.

“So at some stage we even asked our drivers to push more. And both gave answers like, ‘I’m not sure I have much more pace than this’.

“At that stage, we were a little worried that it could have been a more open situation than we thought it would be in the first stint.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“It would have also been tricky for us because [at one point] we had Oscar and Lando that were like 2.5 seconds apart or something.

“If we needed to cover Verstappen it would have been a bit of a problem with them. But thankfully he started to tail off a bit.

“Oscar found quite a lot of pace at the end of the second stint. And this allowed us to go through the pitstop sequence in a controlled way. So I think well done to the drivers in this respect, well done to our tyre engineers. And overall I think this was a good execution of today’s race.”

Stella confirmed that both drivers had to manage their rear tyres from overheating, while the front-left tyre was also susceptible to wear; Norris reported graining on his fronts during the race, although Stella believed that this was actually front-left overheating.

Reviewing the McLarens’ two-stop strategies, Stella stated that this was the fastest strategy for the race – but conceded that there was “risk” involved in taking one fewer stop.

“It comes with some risks in relation to the fact that when you have such a fast three-stopper, you need to push on a two-stop so you need to push on long stints. Sometimes it’s a little unpredictable how much your tyres will go off.

“If you look at the race, if you look at the times at the start of the stint, we were very careful not to push too much at the start of the stint.

“If you push too much at the start of the stint then you’re going to have some degradation at the end which – ultimately is what happened with Verstappen.”