McLaren team principal Andrea Stella compared world championship leader Oscar Piastri and Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher, backing the Australian to quickly recover from a rare off-weekend in Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n
Piastri suffered his first retirement of the season in Baku, crashing in qualifying before repeating the mistake on the opening lap of the race. The costly weekend reduced his lead over teammate Lando Norris to 25 points, while Max Verstappen\u2019s victory rekindled Red Bull\u2019s hopes of mounting a late title challenge.<\/p>\n
Despite the disappointment, Stella \u2014 who worked as Schumacher\u2019s performance engineer at Ferrari from 2002 to 2006 \u2014 insisted that such setbacks are part of every champion\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n
“I’ve worked with multi-champion drivers and in every season, even the most dominant, even one of the best drivers in the history of Formula 1, like Michael Schumacher, I have seen events like this,” Stella said. “As soon as you misjudge the grip available, you get highly punished. But these are the weekends where the most you take away is the learning.”<\/p>\n
Stella stressed that Piastri\u2019s season-long consistency shouldn\u2019t be overlooked, describing Baku as \u201ca one-off\u201d for a driver he called the most solid performer of 2025.<\/p>\n
“Oscar comes out with no points and lots of learning,” Stella added. “I’ve already had a chat with him and his mind is fully functional, already processing what happened and looking forward to the next race.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella compared world championship leader Oscar Piastri and Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher, backing the Australian to quickly recover […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":495730,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"tags":[20972,17680,26616,17480],"news_category":[16921],"gn_keywords":[20973,26613,20684,1081],"acf":{"news_source":"","link_picture":"","announce":"McLaren team boss says the championship leader has already put his mistake in Azerbaijan behind and is looking forward to Singapore Grand Prix","video":[]},"rank_math_focus_keyword":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_robots":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_facebook_title":"","rank_math_facebook_description":"","rank_math_facebook_image":"","rank_math_twitter_title":"","rank_math_twitter_description":"","rank_math_twitter_image":"","rank_math_snippet_shortcode":"","rank_math_primary_category":"","rankmath_seo":{"focus_keyword":"","description":"","title":"","canonical_url":"","robots":"","facebook":{"title":"","description":"","image":""},"twitter":{"title":"","description":"","image":""}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/495729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/495729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495731,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/495729\/revisions\/495731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495729"},{"taxonomy":"news_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news_category?post=495729"},{"taxonomy":"gn_keywords","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gn_keywords?post=495729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}