Andrea Stella showed that he is keeping an eye on Red Bull’s solutions for the 2026 Formula 1 season. The McLaren boss pointed out that the Austrian team’s sidepod is ‘quite interesting’ and emphasized how each team is in search of uncovering their own secrets.
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For the championship restart at the Miami GP, many teams on the grid brought a large package of updates, including McLaren and Red Bull. One of the most striking were the ‘Macarena’ wings from both the Milton Keynes multi-champion and Ferrari.
However, the RB22 sidepod was another point that caught attention, and Stella stated how the rival was smart and innovative with the approach. “For those interested in the technical part, we are at a very, very interesting phase. It is very interesting because, if you observe the sidepod concept that Red Bull introduced, it is quite different from the sidepod concept adopted, for example, by Mercedes and Ferrari, and McLaren’s style is even more different,” he said.
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“There will be stabilization at some point, a convergence, but it seems we are still quite far from that convergence. So, I think there will be a process of comparison between teams, testing and, certainly, each team will be testing and analyzing Red Bull’s concept to see the advantages. They were quite smart and innovative in how they used some legal concessions to introduce this geometry,” he continued.
“I think the overall car designs are far from converging. That does not mean that some things have not started to look like: ‘Ah, this is the direction everyone took,’ but with the 2025 cars, after a few years of regulations, they started to look very similar to each other. I think we are still far from those conditions,” he concluded.
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