McLaren boss, Andrea Stella claims that Red Bull's advantage over his team is mainly down to tyres.

A far cry from the Woking outfit's dismal start to its 2023 campaign, Sao Paulo once again witnessed a spirited performance from the British team, with Lando Norris, in particular, giving Max Verstappen a run for his money in both the Sprint and Grand Prix.

However, while there is no doubt about the MCL60's single lap pace, race pace, as the race develops, remains an issue.

Like most, the McLaren suffered tyre deg issues in Brazil, though not as bad as Ferrari and Mercedes, and it is this that Stella believes is preventing Norris (and Piastri) going head-to-head with the Bulls.

"The difference is mainly in terms of lap time on used tyres," said the Italian. "We have seen that on new tyres we can fight for position.

"But as soon as the tyres degrade, then it would appear like Max, Red Bull, they can just have less degradation," he continued.

"The tyres were degrading maybe one-tenth every two laps. That's a significant amount of degradation and if you can limit that, after 10 laps in a stint, this is tenths of a second, so I think that's where they are superior at the moment."

Unfortunately, Stella admits that the issue cannot be resolved this year.

"Where we think the difference is made, we can't do very much with this car," he said. "The car has improved with the Singapore upgrade in terms of tyre management, but not enough to be able to compete, especially when degradation is high. And we saw some other cars degrading quite a lot, like Mercedes, Ferrari."

At COTA and again in Mexico, both Mercedes and Ferrari were competitive and appeared to have resolved their tyre issues... and then came Brazil.

"That was a bit of a surprise," admits Stella, "because normally, when you have this high level of degradation is also when Mercedes actually seems to do well.

"We are not sure why that happened... even from a Ferrari point of view, I would have expected Ferrari to be more competitive."