F1 News: McLaren Chief "Not Concerned" Over Rookie Oscar Piastri's Lack Of Experience
New McLaren team principal Andrea Stella is confident that having a rookie on the team will not hold them back in the 2023 season.
McLaren have a new driver line-up for the upcoming season after the team parted ways with Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo. It was later revealed that the team had signed rookie driver Oscar Piastri to drive alongside Lando Norris.
Despite Piastri's lack of F1 experience, Stella is still confident in the development of the team for the season. He explained:
"I think the important point is to have continuity with Lando, he keeps the kind of reference.
"And it's a reference that we know very well, because we have gone through the development of Lando together with him.
"And there has certainly been a development from a technical point of view, from a driving point of view, race craft point of view. So I think we know this very well.
"It will become a frame of reference for Oscar as well. And this is in terms of not only Oscar's performance himself, but also understanding the car."
The new team principal, who was promoted after Andreas Seidl left for Sauber, continued:
"We will have a new car, we want to improve some of the things, and drivers are certainly important in relation to that, even though F1, unlike some other sports, relies a lot on numbers, which means we are lucky, as people dealing with that.
"I think if it was a motorbike it would be more difficult to understand what is the role of the rider here? What is the role of the bike?
"But in F1, you pretty much get a very good idea from the numbers, what your competitiveness is. With the drivers, you deal with subtleties, the final percentage of your performance, so I wouldn't be too scared.
"If you give me good numbers, I will take it, even if we don't have very clear references from the drivers."
The team has confidence in the new young driver and Stella believes he has enough talent.
"The journey we want to take with Oscar is also an independent journey. He's certainly very talented. And we want him to use his references, references from the car, references even from what we learned with Daniel and so on.
"But we are quite adamant that he will have enough talent, process, intelligence to kind of find his own way, taking advantage of these references.
"So I'm not very concerned at all that we may lose this kind of experience in terms of comparison."