“I will stay in the present and enjoy the victory” - Andrea on Dutch GP win 

Team Principal Andrea Stella is choosing to stay in the moment rather than looking too far ahead after Lando won an action-packed Dutch Grand Prix.

The summer break allowed the dust to settle on Lando’s triumph in Budapest, but a second win in a row has seen external focus already turn to how the Mastercard McLaren Formula 1 Team can continue our good run of form.

Instead, Andrea put the focus on celebrating another success-filled weekend that saw us claim five trophies in the final Grand Prix at Zandvoort, before it drops off the F1 calendar in 2027.

“It is promising for the future, but above all, I will stay in the present and enjoy this victory, confirming the progress that we made in Hungary,” Andrea told F1TV. “Here it wasn’t as obvious because of the Sprint race. It wasn’t our strongest race pace. I think Ferrari were faster than us.

“Mercedes were obviously very competitive, so we needed to improve the pace, we needed to improve the car, and we needed to improve the driving. The teams and the drivers did it. For Lando in particular, a deserved victory and a victory that is encouraging for the future.”

Lando started the race on Pole but conceded the lead to Kimi Antonelli after a standing restart following an early Red Flag.

The 2025 World Champion then waited for his moment before pulling off an audacious overtake, passing Antonelli and Lewis Hamilton in quick succession on Lap 54 and holding his advantage to secure a third victory in a row in Zandvoort for McLaren.

Andrea added: “With Lando, when we have these tyres that don't have as much grip, I think that is when he expresses his best talent, compared to other drivers. The tyres today were a little tricky, it was difficult to switch them off. But when Lando has to deal with hard and slippery tyres, that is kind of his natural ground, and that’s a talent that he’s exploiting.

“But we need to improve so that we are good in all conditions, because it's a long way to the end of the Championship.”

Oscar and the team will look into why he struggled for race pace after the Australian qualified in fourth and finished sixth, despite an impressive double overtake at the restart.

“Oscar was very competitive in the first stint, but then had a difficult second stint - it was the same for Antonelli,” Andrea surmised. “In the second stint, we weren’t able to switch the tyres on, they remained in a very low-grip condition.

“We saw last year that, when the car has a low level of grip, Oscar needs to adapt the way he drives. This requires quite a bit of mental effort, and that can cost him a couple of tenths a second because he has to work through a process rather than drive on pure instinct.

“The other factor that affected Oscar was the pit stop, when we pitted to cover Russell. These are the couple of things that we need to work on, but I would add that we are in a phase in Formula 1 when there are at least three teams within one tenth of each other, so there is a more significant positional loss.

“We just have to keep working with Oscar. I am happy with the improvements we have seen from him over the weekend and am sure there will be more in the rest of the season.”

Confidence is high following successive victories, bolstered by the impact of a sizeable upgrade, but Monza’s low-downforce circuit will present a very different challenge to Hungary and Zandvoort when we head to Italy for the 13^th round of the season in two weeks’ time.

“There were a few things from a setup point of view that we tweaked and that paid off nicely,” he said. “But if we look at the next race, which is Monza, it is a completely different demand in terms of car performance.

“Hungary and Zandvoort are much closer together - maximum downforce, and dominated by the speed in the corners rather than the speed in the straights, so I would be a little bit careful to say all this extends into Monza.

“But we will definitely go into the next race with some encouragement, and we will try and do our best.”

With 101 points from the last six rounds, Lando is now the highest-scoring driver since the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, ahead of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, who have 95 and 93, respectively.

Having followed up his victory in Hungary with a second successive triumph, Lando described his performance in Zandvoort as one of his best. Taking his chance to move into the lead in the latter half of the race set him up for victory and brought him to within 83 points of leader Antonelli.

For Andrea, the quality of racing is as pleasing as the success of upgrades and improvements the team have been making.

“It's good that McLaren is part of the cars that can fight for the win." He said. “I would like to thank and praise the team and the drivers, because after the Sprint, we made some tweaks to the car, and we adjusted some aspects of the driving style, in terms of the way we could use the tyres in the race, and this paid off.

“A deserved victory from this point of view, thanks to the work that improved the situation from where we were in the Sprint."