Red Bull may be sitting on pole once again, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has cast doubt on the team’s preferred narrative – one that paints them as overachieving underdogs.
Ahead of Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix, Stella suggested that Red Bull is using strategic storytelling to mask the true performance of their car, while also undermining rivals’ efforts.
Max Verstappen will start Sunday’s round of racing in Florida from pole position, his third such achievement in a campaign geared towards clinching his fifth consecutive Drivers’ title.
But McLaren’s recent domination of events has encouraged Red Bull to lean into a storyline suggesting they’re defying the odds just to stay competitive.
A Game Beyond the Stopwatch
Stella, however, isn’t buying the bulls’ carefully crafted self-serving perception and gamesmanship.
“Red Bull, they are very good at making fast cars, they are very exceptionally good I would say at driving fast cars and they are extremely good also in creating the narrative to their advantage,” explained the McLaren chief.
“They exploit every possible opportunity to stay in the competition and some of these opportunities sometimes is to create the narrative like: ‘oh we are making miracles here, the others should win every single practice session and qualifying and race’.
“But this is the narrative created by some of our competitors which we read occasionally and then we change the page, and we focus on ourselves and when we focus on ourselves we look at the numbers, we look at the facts, we look at what we should be improving and there's a lot that we should be improving.
“So for me when I look at the facts, I also look at what Lando and Oscar deliver and deliver quite consistently. So yeah, well done to Red Bull even in terms of the way they manage their non-technical opportunities.”
“We Have Two Quick Drivers and They Don’t”
Backing up his team boss’s scepticism, Lando Norris, who will start second in Miami alongside Verstappen, shared his view that Red Bull’s performance advantage – if any – is difficult to gauge from the outside.
Asked whether Verstappen was outperforming in an inferior car, Norris responded bluntly: “It is impossible to know what car he's got compared to us. The advantage we have is two quick drivers and they don't.
“We have a car that's capable of allowing drivers to drive quicker but impossible to know, impossible to actually know the difference between the two cars.”
Norris’s comments take a subtle jab at Red Bull’s driver lineup, implying that McLaren’s own driver duo of Norris and Oscar Piastri is extracting more consistent performance from their equipment.
As the battle at the front tightens and narratives off the track intensify, Miami is shaping up not just as a fight for championship points—but for control of the storylines that shape perception in the Formula 1 paddock.
Read also: Norris hoped Verstappen becoming a father 'would slow him down'
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