08/10/2025
NEWS STORY
Insisting that pit stop problems have affected both drivers equally, Andrea Stella admits that the issues may not be resolved this season.
Another race, another pit stop problem, with Oscar Piastri losing out following three races in which his teammate's efforts were compromised. Piastri lost around 3s during his botched stop in Singapore while Norris lost out at Zandvoort, Monza and Baku, though the subsequent actions in Italy opened up an entirely different can of worms.
Admitting that the problems are mainly down to human error, the McLaren boss was keen to stress the intensity and complexity of the pit stop process.
"Even if we see the execution of the pitstop by the pit crew, this is really a combination of the human factor, the execution, the operation, with the quality of the hardware and how much the hardware makes the operation of changing tyres as natural and as easy as possible," said the Italian.
He was also keen to dismiss speculation that the problems were more focussed on one particular side of the garage.
"For the sake of checking it, we saw that when you average the pitstop time, it's pretty much the same over the season for Lando and Oscar," he said. "I think it's just a coincidence due to the short observation window of the last couple of events that this has accumulated on Lando's side.
"Actually, the data don't seem to support that across the season," he insisted.
However, as the title fight intensifies, not helped by incidents such as that at Monza or indeed on the opening lap in Singapore, Stella admits that there is no magic bullet.
"In our review, we identified that we needed to improve in all factors, from a human point of view, but also we know that our hardware makes the operation, for instance the gunning, a little bit more complex than it should be," he conceded.
"We are applying some corrections, which will be mainly for next year now," he continued. "At the same time, we are working with our pit crew to make sure that we can mitigate some of these difficulties introduced by the hardware. It's quite a lot of work of review and correction and testing and practicing at the factory with the rig."
Considering what's at stake - especially with Max coming up on the outside rail - that work would seem to be a very small price to pay.