Stella stands by McLaren's intermediate tyre call despite disaster

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has defended the decision to start both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri on intermediate tyres at the Canadian Grand Prix, insisting the call was justified given the conditions at the moment it needed to be made — even as the gamble unravelled spectacularly in real time.

A Race That Unravelled

What followed was a deeply damaging afternoon for the Woking outfit. Piastri, clawing his way back through the field, collided clumsily with Alex Albon, compounding an already difficult recovery. Norris, meanwhile, retired with mechanical trouble. For a team harbouring championship ambitions, the points haul was nothing short of a disaster. As Piastri himself admitted post-race, McLaren were left looking like idiots after the intermediate tyre gamble backfired.

"You have to consider that the tyres are fit five minutes before the start and that there were kind of seven minutes when we needed to operationally make a decision," Stella explained. "In our view the track was greasy. Already there was trouble keeping temperature in the tyres on a dry track, but at the time it was greasy, and it was raining. So, we thought that at the time you have to make a decision as to what was the right tyre for the moment."

Timing and Bad Luck

Central to Stella's defence is the role that timing played in turning a defensible call into a costly one. The rain, he noted, stopped very rapidly after the decision was locked in. More critically, a double formation lap — triggered by Arvid Lindblad's stricken Racing Bulls car — stripped McLaren of the early laps during which the intermediate tyres might have offered a meaningful advantage over rivals struggling to generate heat in their slicks.

"After that the rain very rapidly stopped and also there was a double formation lap which I think took the best out of this decision," Stella said. "I would have been pretty interested in seeing the cars with the dry tyres, had the race started at the time it should have started."

"So, I think we're a bit unlucky with the fact that the rain had just stopped and the fact that there was a double extra formation lap. In hindsight we were penalised by the decision but at the time that the decision needed to be made, I think the conditions existed to fit an intermediate tyre."

A Shared Call at the Highest Level

Stella also revealed that the tyre decision was not taken in isolation by the engineers. The team principal himself contributed to the final call, motivated specifically by concern over the opening lap in cold, greasy conditions — where slick runners would face a genuine challenge bringing front tyre temperatures into an acceptable window.

That logic, it should be noted, appeared to hold briefly at the start. Norris — benefiting from the superior launch traction of the intermediates — vaulted from third to the lead before his tyre advantage rapidly became a handicap as the circuit dried.

"In terms of making the decision actually it was relatively shared by the pitwall and the drivers. I even gave my input myself when a call needed to be made," Stella added. "I just wanted to be sure that we were on a tyre that we could withstand the first lap. We always have to be a bit careful in judging decisions simply from the outcome. I think you have to judge the decision at the time that they need to be made. With the rain lasting for a few more minutes and the race starting at the right time, we could have seen cars struggling on dry tyres."

Norris, for his part, also defended the intermediate tyre gamble in his own post-race comments, maintaining there were valid reasons behind the strategy despite ultimately retiring from the race.

The episode serves as a sharp reminder that in Formula 1, the margin between bold and reckless is often determined by factors entirely outside a team's control — and on Sunday in Montreal, the weather and a red flag conspired to make the wrong call out of what McLaren believed, in the moment, was the right one.