Here's the thing about a race weekend that slips through your fingers: the raw speed was there, but the execution simply refused to line up. Andrea Stella has been looking back at how McLaren missed out on a podium finish during the United States Grand Prix, even while maintaining that the machine underneath their drivers held true pace with the frontrunners.
Saturday in Austin was a proper struggle. Lando Norris and team mate Oscar Piastri found themselves mired down the order in Qualifying, securing only eighth and seventh on the grid respectively. Stella admitted that while the team felt they possessed a faster car than what they actually managed to squeeze out on track, calling it good for second place in quali was perhaps a stretch. Extracting the absolute limit from this year's machinery over a single flying lap is a brutal task, and the team had to settle for a difficult starting spot.
Come Sunday, however, the picture shifted. Once the relentless-push nature of qualifying gave way to the rhythm of a Grand Prix, the machine came alive. Stella noted that the car ran as competitive as the Ferraris and Red Bull, with only Kimi Antonelli appearing a step ahead of everyone else. Norris climbed as high as second place in the closing stages thanks to a daring one-stop strategy, while those around him—including Max Verstappen and the Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton—charged on a two-stop approach.
That strategy gamble required a Safety Car to truly lock in the podium, and as Stella pointed out with a hint of frustration, it simply never arrived. The team knew keeping the charging Verstappen and Leclerc behind on aging hard tires was an uphill battle, while holding off Hamilton depended entirely on how those tires held on until the final moments. In the end, Norris slipped to fifth, calling it the best result possible, while Piastri crossed the line seventh after a hard defensive fight to keep Mercedes' George Russell at bay.
This marks a tough run for Norris, who has now missed out on the podium in the last four Grands Prix following his summer victories. But relief is supposedly on the horizon. Stella confirmed that new upgrades are in the pipeline, arriving across Brazil and Vegas—though Mexico will see very little—with the explicit goal of pushing McLaren back into consistent podium fights and the hunt for victories.
