McLaren’s superiority over the rest of the field after the opening race of the 2025 Formula One season came as a surprise to team principal Andrea Stella, he admitted after their performance in Australia on Sunday and he now believes their car may have an advantage that will make them hard to beat this season.
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Lando Norris won in Melbourne with a strong run from pole to flag, beating Red Bull’s Max Verstappen into second and the Mercedes of George Russell into third. During the race, interrupted by repeated safety cars as the tricky, wet conditions took their toll, Norris and his teammate Oscar Piastri were at times able to open a huge gap on their rivals, at some points up to over one and half seconds a lap.
Only Verstappen could stay with them in the early phases of the race and noticeably in so doing chewed through his tyres in no short order, while Mercedes and Ferrari were unable to keep in touch at all.
Norris afterwards said he thought the team were now favourites and Stella believed his team had stolen a genuine march on their rivals after an aggressive approach to developing their car over the winter.
“It is a little bit of a surprise for us as to how competitive the car is but a surprise in terms of the extent; it’s not a surprise in terms of the objectives,” he said. “Last year when deciding what kind of approach we should have for the 2025 car, considering that the 2024 Miami upgrade looked pretty competitive, we wanted to be ambitious because we saw that the level of competitiveness we were receiving from Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull was so strong that there was no room for complacency.”
Norris and Piastri were able to exploit the pace of the MCL39 but also notably to really lean on its tyres while doing so, rather than having to manage their rubber. This is likely to prove a crucial differentiator in the season going forward and may be an advantage which makes their car unassailable.
“We gave ourselves technical targets which had to do with aerodynamic efficiency but also we wanted to improve from a mechanical point of view and the interaction with the tyres,” Stella explained. “On Sunday we saw that the car interacts with the tyres very well. We were able to open a gap which I don’t think is the car itself only, it is also how gentle our car is on the tyres.”
Mercedes’ George Russell had noted the advantage almost immediately after qualifying and indicated that other teams might already consider McLaren uncatchable.
“They can stop development now and go fully on 2026 as it’s difficult to overcome that gap,” he said. “If you’ve got a six-tenths advantage at the start of the year, nobody finds six-tenths throughout the course of a year. So McLaren are in prime position for now and the future.”
While Piastri managed only ninth after a spin dropped him to the back when rain hit the circuit late in the race, he too demonstrated formidable pace. Norris’s winning margin was under a second after a late safety car helped Verstappen close him down but Stella noted that the British driver was comfortable even with his car having taken a hit, ominously suggesting there was yet more to come from the McLaren.
“Lando had the floor pretty badly damaged,” he said. “He lost aerodynamic performance and this meant that he couldn’t utilise the full pace of the car. So the situation got more tense than would have normally been the case because of the damage. How strong the car was we could see with Oscar that in the space of a few laps he recovered three or four positions. In normal circumstances it shouldn’t have been that difficult for Lando.”
