'Greedy' McLaren must take 'responsibility' for British GP decisions - Stella

McLaren was "a little greedy" and must take "responsibility" in the two wrong calls that ruined its chances of victory in the British Grand Prix, believes Andrea Stella. 

As rain fell at Silverstone, the McLaren appeared to be the fastest car on-track, evidenced by Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri surging to the lead, but this presented a major problem when the change to intermediates was required. 

Not wanting to risk a double-stack pit-stop, McLaren sent Piastri around for a further lap on slick tyres, which dropped him from the lead to sixth place and out of contention for victory as Norris resumed control of the race.

The other major call centered around putting soft tyres instead of a brand-new set of mediums on Norris on the switch-back to slicks, with the degradation costing him second place to hard-shod Max Verstappen late on.

Reflecting on the calls, Stella believes McLaren simply got "greedy."

"We should have pushed harder for the double stack, because by delaying Oscar's stop by one lap, we lost much more time than in a double stack," he told media including RacingNews365.

"So in hindsight, that was the right thing to do the pit-stops at the same time, we will take the learning from this experience, and we will do better next time.

"I think we were a little greedy that we didn't want to accept that we would have lost time with the double stack, but effectively, sometimes you just have to be patient and accept that you're going to lose time, but just do the right thing. 

"Rather than hoping that one lap more is not going to cost that much, especially when the rain was pretty steady. 

"Going onto the soft wasn't the right call for us. In fact, we degraded the tyres too much to be able to retain the position on Verstappen and Lewis [Hamilton], and in fairness, Lewis did a really good job of making the soft tyres last."

Norris soft tyre call

As for the decision as to take softs instead of mediums for Norris, with whom it was discussed over the radio, Stella added that as the team is in possession of more information, it should have simply made the call.

"This was a decision from the people we should have taken, like stopping Oscar in the double stack, we should have taken the responsibility to say "this is the right tyre," he added.

"I think in checking with Lando we kind of self-doubted it and this led us to follow this direction which in hindsight was incorrect.

"We have the possibility to make the call, we have more information, we have more people so going on medium rather than soft would have been the better call.

"Like it is 100% my responsibility, other people, the driver give their point of view, and in this case, the call should have been to go to the medium because the soft may not make it to the end."