Andrea Stella stated that he has enough work within McLaren to worry about the team’s own challenges, when asked what he would do if he were in Laurent Mekies’ place at Red Bull during the crisis the Austrian team is facing in the 2026 Formula 1 season.
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Red Bull is under pressure to keep Max Verstappen, who has been linked to McLaren, especially after his long-time race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, moved to the British team. Additionally, the RB22 has been presenting difficulties, and problems with the movable rear wing caused incidents at the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, increasing the Dutch driver’s dissatisfaction.
Stella emphasized, however, that McLaren also has its own concerns. The team seeks to recover lost performance to Mercedes and Ferrari, while facing reliability issues and difficulties making the MCL40 a consistent car in the fight for wins and podiums. Asked by the press about a possible situation in Red Bull’s leadership, the Italian replied:
“You mean, if I were Laurent? Well, you know what? I have enough work at McLaren to gain half a second in the shortest possible time. We cannot forget that we also did not have a good start to the season from a reliability point of view, and that involves the power unit area, but also involves the chassis area.”
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Stella also mentioned the British GP, where he assessed that Oscar Piastri should have made a pit stop one lap earlier: “Even today, from an operational point of view, I am here saying that we should have stopped Oscar one lap earlier, and we would have saved some race time,” he said.
Although he did not go into details about Red Bull, Stella praised Mekies and said he believes in the manager’s ability: “Laurent is very capable; he is very smart, very competent, so I am sure he will do everything necessary, and McLaren and Red Bull, hopefully, will be able to join Mercedes and Ferrari, and we can have an even more exciting Formula 1 in the second half of the season,” he concluded.
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