McLaren F1 Team Principal Andrea Stella left the 2026 Singapore GP with a realistic outlook.
The papaya team banked solid points on Sunday at Marina Bay. However, the Italian knew the result owed as much to circumstances as to pace.
A late-race charge had lifted both cars into the top five, but a missed podium chance and an unexplained slow puncture tempered the mood.
Stella addressed the performance ceiling, the decision to keep both drivers on the soft tyres at the start, a Safety Car gamble that never paid off and the mystery surrounding Oscar Piastri’s rubber.
Stella on McLaren F1 Team’s performance at the 2026 Singapore GP
The Italian Team Principal did not sugarcoat the team’s raw pace. Instead, he framed the result against what the car could deliver on merit. McLaren had the fourth best car at Marina Bay but thanks to Isack Hadjar and George Russell starting at the back, P5 and P6 was virtually guaranteed heading into the 62-lap contest.
“I think in terms of the result that we could achieve on merit, a fourth and fifth is probably the best we could hope for,” he said.
However, he also acknowledged that circumstances lent a hand. Lewis Hamilton’s decision to do a 44-lap stint on softs backfired spectacularly as he dropped from P2 to P6.
“I think we’ve been helped by the fact that Hamilton degraded massively the tyres and it became ultimately an easy overtaking for both cars and this gave us a position,” the team principal explained.
Nevertheless, Stella flagged a nagging what-if for McLaren at the F1 Singapore GP. As Norris and Antonelli caught the seven-time World Champion in the final 10 laps, the driver of car #1 tried a move into Turn 1 on Lap 54. Hamilton went into the run-off, with Norris going deep. The Mercedes driver cashed in by passing both that lap.
Norris did eventually get the Ferrari driver but his chance of the podium was gone as the points leader was on softs versus his mediums.
“At the same time, there’s a point of view where, thanks to the racing situations, it would have been interesting to see if Lando could have defended against Antonelli and did not lose the position while overtaking [Lewis] Hamilton,” he said. “So there’s a point of view whereby today we might have missed the podium finish.”
Beyond that, Stella weighed the result against a difficult weekend and recent run through Baku and Malaysia.
“But considering that we come from a sequence of races in which we haven’t scored good points and we come from a Saturday which has challenged the team from different points of view, including not many points in the Sprint with only one point, I would take this result, I would welcome this result, get the points and make sure that we reset and we go on to the next triple-header with some encouragement and also with some improvements to the car that hopefully we will be able to deliver with some upgrades.”
Medium tyres, split strategies and the safety car gamble
When questioned on why the McLaren drivers started on identical rubber for the 2026 F1 Singapore GP, Stella’s answer centred on the lack of pace from the medium tyre.
“We didn’t split the starting tyre between our two drivers because we thought that the medium wasn’t a great tyre, so we wanted to take as maximum advantage as possible in the early phases of the race, including the start and the first lap,” he said.
Stella then explained the risk the medium carried. Lewis Hamilton got off the tyre on Lap 18 as the soft was far superior. It left car #44 over 10s off the lead by the time he boxed.
“We thought that the medium might have meant that you could have lost ground compared to the other cars, which I think is actually what happened with [Lewis] Hamilton, and then might have forced you to pit early, so pretty much the race that happened to [Lewis] Hamilton is the race that we did not want to have.”
After the Ferraris and Antonelli stopped, his team rolled the dice on a Safety Car.
“Once the other cars pitted, we tried to stay out to see if a safety car could give us the benefit of the reduced pit delta, which here is quite powerful, you can save up to 12 seconds, but unfortunately there was no safety car and we pretty much raced for the same position as before the stop.”
Still, Stella backed the team’s calls.
“So I think from a strategy point of view, the strategy was overall pretty well managed by our team,” he said.
Slow puncture left Stella and McLaren seeking answers at F1 Singapore GP
The conversation turned to Oscar Piastri’s slow puncture that forced a second stop. Stella admitted the cause remains unclear.
“Coming back to the slow puncture, we don’t know yet the reason for that, so we’ll have to work with Pirelli,” he stated.
He also stressed how unusual the issue was. “It’s honestly a pretty unusual event, it’s the first time that I hear about a slow puncture this year and it didn’t cost very much to Oscar [Piastri] today, but in a closer race it could have been a significant loss of time, so definitely something that we need to get on top of,” Stella explained.
Ultimately, he framed it as a sport-wide concern rather than a team-specific flaw.
“I don’t think that this is a team dependent kind of issue, but ideally it doesn’t happen for any competitor,” he concluded.
For Stella and McLaren, the takeaways from the F1 Singapore GP were clear: bank the points, investigate the puncture and chase upgrades before the next round.
