Stella encouraged by McLaren pace – but wary of increased competition

Andrea Stella says McLaren’s race pace in testing is “encouraging” but believes the outright speed in other cars could mean six teams battling at the front this season.

Carlos Sainz set the pace for Williams on day two of testing in Bahrain as he completed his pre-season schedule, getting an opportunity to run lower fuel and explore performance more than the traditional front-running teams. McLaren did not complete a low fuel lap, but during race simulations Lando Norris appeared to have the edge over the Ferrari and Mercedes on comparable runs – a scenario Stella acknowledged.

“Every team will always be looking at the information they have in relation to competitors,” Stella said. “But really, in my case, while I do so, the main focus for me and the main focus for the team is to look at the data and compare this data and car behavior with what we were expecting.

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“And this is true from an aerodynamic point of view; we have several tests from a mechanical point of view; we have made some innovative changes to car layout and we wanted to check that the car behaves as expected. So, at the moment, in these first couple of days, this has been our focus.

“Definitely, we talked about not getting distracted by what we see from competitors. The long-run pace… it looks encouraging. At the same time, we see that at low fuel, there are definitely several cars that are in condition to put together very competitive lap times, which I think are competitive in absolute terms.

“So, if anything, my take so far is that I was thinking, before coming here, that in the past, we used to talk about the top three. Then, thankfully, McLaren has kind of added, now we have the top four.

“But perhaps this year, we might have to adapt our language again, which would be great for Formula 1 and then maybe the top five or the top six. So, we will see. Certainly, there seem to be a few quick cars out there.”

Along with the Williams, the Alpine appears strong of last year’s midfield runners so far, but Stella said he won’t read too much into the average lap times from the race simulations given the cool and damp conditions seen this week.

“I think in terms of tire choice, our long run was just aimed at testing the three compounds and see how they behave,” he said. “And I think everyone, even if they change the order, they wanted to achieve the same, just see what are the right compounds for the race, considering that Pirelli have changed the nature of the compounds compared to what we had last year, and they do seem to be different.

“At the same time, we are testing long runs in conditions which are pretty unique. It’s cold tarmac, cold air temperature. Bahrain is unique itself in terms of the macro roughness [of the track surface], so I think it’s overall good information – obviously, when you go through long runs and race simulations – but all the information we get needs to be taken with some care. We need to be careful, because for all the reasons I just said, it’s very particular.

“When we go to the early races of the season, the kind of stress on the tires, the requirement in terms of interaction between the car and the tires will be completely different. So the indications here in Bahrain seem to say that the car at the moment interacts well with the tires, but in a very specific and special regime like we have in these days here.”