McLaren won’t bring any further upgrades to its 2025 car to help Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris hold off Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship, but the squad feels Norris’ US Grand Prix race pace offered some reassurance.
Verstappen won his third grand prix in four on Sunday, as well as taking maximum points in the Austin sprint race that saw both Piastri and Norris eliminated.
That has brought the four-time world champion right back into the title fight, trailing Piastri by 40 points with five weekends to go. Norris now follows 14 points behind his Australian team-mate.
Following Verstappen’s dominant display at the Circuit of the Americas, there is little doubt his Red Bull RB21 is now F1’s quickest car after an impressive turnaround by the team.
In terms of hardware, the 2025 development race is now over, with McLaren turning off the tap earlier than Red Bull and Mercedes. Piastri and Norris won’t be getting any new parts over the remaining races, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella confirmed.
“When it comes to new upgrades, new parts, then this will not happen for the rest of the season,” Stella said on Sunday night.
Andrea Stella, McLaren
Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images
But Stella also saw some reassuring signs in Austin. As while fifth-placed Piastri struggled with confidence in the car, Norris’ race pace was much more impressive and looked largely on par with Verstappen at the front.
However, Norris’ victory bid came undone by falling behind Charles Leclerc at the start on a circuit where overtaking was not straightforward.
“In terms of the trend, today is a relatively reassuring race, because I think without having to fight with Charles, which was certainly an entertaining fight itself, I think Lando had the pace to win the race today,” Stella was adamant.
“Obviously, he needed to gain the position on track, which is never easy with Max. And with a one-stop strategy, not necessarily we would have had many opportunities from a strategic point of view. But performance-wise, I think we are reassured that the pace was sufficient to fight for the victory.”
Norris and McLaren also had zero data to rely on from Saturday’s 19-lap sprint after being taken out at the start, which hampered the squad’s set-up work in between the sprint and Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session.
“Not having done the sprint race left us a little bit on the back foot from a setup point of view,” Stella explained. “And in hindsight, we can see already that there was more performance that we could have extracted from the car.”
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