It was no miracle that Max Verstappen beat Lando Norris to pole position for the Miami Grand Prix, Andrea Stella calling that out as a “narrative” created by Red Bull.

Verstappen secured his third Grand Prix pole position of the F1 2025 championship at the Miami Autodrome on Saturday as he bounced back from an unsafe release penalty in the Sprint to set the pace in qualifying.

Andrea Stella: ‘Oh we are making miracles here…’

The Red Bull driver posted a 1:26.204 to beat Norris by 0.065 with Kimi Antonelli a further 0.002s off the pace. Oscar Piastri was fourth in the other McLaren.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner called it “another stunning performance” in a “really impressive” session from the Dutchman.

But if you ask Stella, that’s a narrative Red Bull are pushing as they try to claim that “others”, unsaid as McLaren, should be winning everything.

F1 2025: The season’s winners and losers

👉 The results of the F1 2025 championship

👉 The updated Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship standings

McLaren are ahead in the Grand Prix stats, having won four to one, but when it comes to qualifying, the RB21 has been a match for the MCL39 with Red Bull claiming half of this season’s Grand Prix pole positions.

“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,” Stella told the media in Miami.

“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.”

But quizzed on whether Verstappen is driving a ‘sub-standard car’ while his drivers are making too many mistakes in the ‘best’ car, the team boss called into question what exactly is the best car.

“I don’t think we can distinguish what the car is… you used the better car. No, like the better car is the performance that you can realise with a car, it is not the absolute potential. Okay, like we see with our car that occasionally we can produce really good corners, but it’s difficult to be repeatable for our drivers.

“Like Oscar made a comment. He said, like, ‘when after Q2 lap, I thought, like, wow, this corner one was so good. I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to repeat because I’m not sure exactly how I made it, because the car didn’t give me great feeling as to how this was happening’.

“I’m giving away a little bit of description if you want, but just to make sure that my point is clear, you know, like it’s a car that doesn’t give you much cueing, which is the technical word we use. This means that it’s not easy for our drivers to repeat some big performances that we can see in individual laps.

“So what is the better car? Is it a car that may have more potential but more difficult to exploit, or a car that may have a little bit less big potential, but is more sincere to explo?

“For me as a team principal, I’m fine with the fact that we have created a car with a lot of potential, but I am not happy with the team performance in relation. How easy we are making the car to be exploited. So this is a technical engineering challenge that the McLaren team needs to take on board and fix.

“I think our drivers are doing an excellent job. Our drivers, if anything, are the best example of robustness and consistency that I can see. We’ve seen it last year, delivering the Constructors’ Championship, and we see this year leading both championships, both drivers in the Drivers’ Championship, with a car that we see.

“It’s not like it is miles faster than the other cars.”

McLaren line up on the Miami GP grid leading the Constructors’ Championship on 203 points, 101 points more than Red Bull who are third.

Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are 1-2 in the Drivers’ standings where the Aussie has a nine-point lead over his team-mate. Verstappen is third, a further 10 points off the pace.

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