McLaren has admitted the championship will discourage it from attempting “adventurous strategies” like George Russell’s one-stop in Formula 1’s Belgian Grand Prix.
Russell exceeded expectations at Spa-Francorchamps to gamble on completing one fewer pit stop to win the race until he was excluded owing to an underweight car.
The Briton expressed post-race that he was stunned that other drivers didn’t adopt his approach, with Piastri, who came home third, conceding that it was considered.
Instead, the Australian ran an extended middle stint and mounted a late charge to close on the leading Mercedes cars, but he was unable to fathom a passing chance.
McLaren boss Andrea Stella has explained how the pit wall’s wariness that a possible one-stop could backfire prompted the decision to stick with a conventional plan.
Asked whether Piastri could have one-stopped, he said: “In terms of could we, yes, in hindsight, we considered that we were not adamant that that was going to work.
“And in case this kind of strategy doesn’t work, it can become very, very painful, because then it’s too late to pit, and therefore you may lose a lot of positions.
“I think, in terms of considering this, because if you commit to this, and it doesn’t work, you can probably screw up a race day.”
Stella has disclosed that McLaren was caught unaware that passing proved harder than anticipated as Piastri was unable to make an impression on either Mercedes.
“With Oscar, we thought we had strong pace, and we were in condition to use a more conventional stop, to recover positions,” he continued.
“I think the two factors that today were different from our initial expectations, where the degradation on the tyres was lower than expected, but above all, overtaking was more difficult.
“That surprised us, and when you had a bit of tyre advantage, it was still not enough to overtake, because we saw with Lewis [Hamilton] and Russell, I don’t think the positions were frozen.
“That’s why I understood, it’s simply that with the effect of the dirty air, it was just not possible to overtake as easily as we thought.”
Stella also revealed that McLaren’s growing title challenge to Red Bull has entered the equation when it comes to dictating the strategies that the side opts to impose.
“I think in Russell’s position, there was potentially more motivation to take a risky approach, like if it doesn’t work,” the Italian highlighted.
“But for us, we want to think slightly more robustly, and we see today, we scored again higher than Red Bull, we are now 43 points behind.
“I think we need to be a little cautious with adventurous strategies, which in hindsight today actually proved to be good.”
Meanwhile, Lando Norris wasted another glorious chance to bolster his own title prospects with championship leader Max Verstappen incurring a 10-place grid drop.
Norris, who started seven places higher on the grid, rued dipping his wheels into the gravel at Turn 1 at the start as he ended up behind the Dutchman in fifth position.
Like with his team-mate, McLaren elected to box Norris later and ceded track position to Verstappen, who managed to resist the Briton’s advances in the closing laps.
Pressed on whether the Woking-based squad should have shadowed Russell to counter Norris’ sluggish start, Stella answered: “I need to review this one, I have to say.
“Potentially, I need to understand if Lando was in the right position to do so, because obviously having extended, you tend to lose some positions on the track.
“For us, the plan with Lando was robust. It’s just that we were a little surprised that we could not overtake.
“The other one, where we were surprised, and this could be also to do with how good Verstappen is as a driver.
“Like he made the Medium last in the final stint, like not many other drivers managed to do today. We were just expecting that his tyres would have fallen off, and they didn’t.
“So we thought overtaking Verstappen would have been easy, and it proved not to be the case.
“I’ll have to review whether with Lando it would have been a good idea to just follow what Russell was doing.”
