Red Bull good at inventing its own underdog “narrative,” says Andrea Stella

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes Formula 1 rivals Red Bull are inventing a “narrative” that suggests it is achieving miracles just by competing for pole positions and wins this season.

Max Verstappen sealed his third pole position of 2025 for Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix and will be aiming to convert it into a second victory of the campaign to remain in the fight for a fifth consecutive drivers’ title.

The Dutchman has been able to keep the McLaren duo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri honest so far, despite widespread acknowledgement that the Woking squad has the fastest car on the grid.

But for Stella, the suggestion that Red Bull are severely lagging behind in the battle at the front is something it is happy to play in to.

“Red Bull they are very good at making fast cars, they are very exceptionally good I would say at driving fast cars and they are extremely good also in creating the narrative to their advantage,” he said.

“They exploit every possible opportunity to stay in the competition and some of these opportunities sometimes is to create the narrative like: ‘oh we are making miracles here, the others should win every single practice session and qualifying and race’.

“But this is the narrative created by some of our competitors which we read occasionally and then we change the page, and we focus on ourselves and when we focus on ourselves we look at the numbers, we look at the facts, we look at what we should be improving and there’s a lot that we should be improving.

“So for me when I look at the facts I also look at what Lando and Oscar deliver and deliver quite consistently, so yeah, well done to Red Bull even in terms of the way they manage their non-technical opportunities.”

Norris will start alongside Verstappen on the front row in Miami and, asked by AS/MS in the post-qualifying press conference if his friend and rival was getting more out of the Red Bull than he and Piastri in the superior McLaren, he replied: “It is impossible to know what car he’s got compared to us. I mean, the advantage we have is two quick drivers and they don’t.

“We have a car that’s capable of allowing drivers to drive quicker but impossible to know, impossible to actually know the difference between the two cars.”

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