Who slept best last night: Andrea Stella

Andrea Stella doesn’t approve of chaos – or, frankly, any other form of imperfection.

It’s already a well-known tradition even outside the paddock. The Italian’s media sessions are always delayed by a minute or two simply because he absolutely must sort out the mess on the table, created by journalists tossing their phones and recording devices onto it. He takes them one by one to create some form of structure, preferably symmetrical, placing them in order.

Journalists joke about it – as was again the case ahead of his Saturday 7pm media session at the Hungaroring, the first this year after McLaren delivered its first – and the first for any non-Mercedes driver this year – pole position. But when Stella was offered to “leave it as chaos” this time as another exception, he immediately refused.

“No,” he said with a smile. “No. That one is the only option that we don’t pursue.”

And he formed a perfect square of multiple devices in front of him before the questions were allowed to start.

It wasn’t the last imperfection that delayed the McLaren boss that evening, though, as the microphones refused to work reliably, forcing him to ask Luca Colajanni, the team’s communications chief, for a replacement less than a minute into his first answer.

Then it happened again. And then again.

When the red light started flashing on his microphone for the third time – perhaps signalling some form of super clipping – Stella directed his attention to Colajanni once again.

“You’re trying to embarrass me,” he said with a smile. But perhaps only the people in McLaren’s communications department can tell whether he was joking or not. Word is, Stella doesn’t just let these little imperfections pass without trying to correct them and explain to his people why it should not be in McLaren’s culture to settle for anything less than flawless execution, whatever the process.

It was execution Stella was mainly talking about on Saturday. It wasn’t McLaren’s pace alone that allowed Lando Norris to claim his first pole position as Formula 1 world champion – it was also the team’s execution that made it possible, as it was still Ferrari, according to the Italian, that had the best car in Budapest, at least up until that point.

“When we look carefully at the data, we see that if we take the best corners of [Charles] Leclerc and the best corners of [Lewis] Hamilton, I think still they had the highest potential. And some of the results, I think, is also…” Stella said before his microphone refused to work again – and continued with a replacement. “It’s down to execution, I think. Execution from a team point of view, because we’ve been, I think, particularly diligent in finding some good countermeasures for the difficult conditions and good execution from the drivers.”

The 2026 season is far from being perfect for McLaren, especially compared to last year’s first half of the championship. Yet there are valid reasons for that too. It was much easier for Mercedes and Ferrari – those now leading the constructors’ standings – to stop investing in their 2025 projects and switch their full attention to their first cars for the new era of regulations.

And, of course, it’s only now that the potential disadvantages of being a customer team in Formula 1 have become so apparent. It was a recurring topic in Stella’s briefings, in which he – without placing any blame on his partner – gently but methodically and in detail explained how McLaren’s understanding of the new Mercedes HPP product isn’t at the level of the Mercedes works team’s engineering department. That McLaren’s simulation tools aren’t allowing the team to fully exploit the product it has been provided with.

And it was only on that Saturday that he declared for the first time that “some of the inconsistencies” (what a phrase!) McLaren experienced at the previous round, it wasn’t experiencing anymore.

That came as an added benefit of McLaren’s own upgrade, introduced in Hungary – the first part of a new package that has only been partially delivered for now, with a few more bits expected over the upcoming races. Stella’s team, unlike Ferrari for example, develops in large steps. The first came in Miami and, although it delivered the expected boost in performance, McLaren was then largely outpaced by rivals who prefer smaller but more frequent updates.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

What stands out about McLaren, though, is that it has consistently – throughout several years now under Stella’s leadership – unlocked a huge chunk of lap time with each and every package it has brought from Woking to the track.

There’s another Stella trait – even more famous than his obsession with arranging journalists’ recording devices: he always seems – or genuinely is – surprised every single time a McLaren upgrade delivers another significant step forward.

This wasn’t an exception this time either.

“I think the improvement from a competitiveness point of view can be entirely ascribed to the upgrades that we took here, which like I said yesterday, and like you might have seen in the submission form, included several items,” he said on Sunday evening.

“But at the same time, we were sort of thinking that this lap time step not necessarily would have been enough to be in pole position at the Hungaroring, and definitely we would not thought that there would be enough to have such a strong pace in the race.

“Honestly, I still believe that if we want to be in a position to fight for victories consistently in the future, we need to keep our focus on delivering more upgrades.”

It was, perhaps, inevitable that McLaren would struggle at the start of this season, having been involved in the title fight until the end of last year while also being a Mercedes customer. Yet its meticulous recovery – with Stella’s team displaying the usual, well-recognised traits – can hardly leave anyone thinking it won’t soon be back to winning regularly and fighting for titles.

Andrea Stella, McLaren, Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

“When I was thanking the team for the upgrades, I omitted to thank HPP,” he said at the end of his Sunday media session. “And I want to extend this thank you beyond the fact that obviously you thank your technical partner and power unit supplier, but there’s been really good work following some of the conversations around exploitation of the power unit, and I think here at the Hungaroring is the event in which McLaren and HPP have done the best job of squeezing every single millisecond out of the power unit. And the fact that yesterday we were in pole position by 12 milliseconds, definitely there’s a lot that can be found in the power unit. So thank you to HPP.”

McLaren seems to have already eliminated many of the little imperfections that had been holding the team back for several months.

Undoubtedly, there’s still work to do, but make no mistake: Stella won’t let his team leave a single detail unnoticed or uncorrected.

As you may have guessed, his microphone was working flawlessly on Sunday.

We want your opinion!

– The Motorsport.com Team

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: motorsport.com