Andrea Stella admits that the increasing threat from Max Verstappen caused McLaren to rethink Lando Norris' repercussions stance.

With the Dutchman having reduced a 104-point deficit to 40-points in just a few short weekends, McLaren realised it had more serious things to worry about than keeping Norris in check, despite the increasing fear of the papaya rules being the Woking outfit's undoing.

Consequently, in the wake of Oscar Piastri's admitted mistake at the start of last weekend's Sprint, the threat of repercussions for Norris has been withdrawn.

"As usual, we review things, team, drivers, in a very open way, in a very constructive way," said Stella. "We thought the best approach moving forward was to start with a clean slate and focus in the only direction on which we want to focus, to make sure that the championship is papaya.

"All the rest is less important," he admitted, "and there's somebody that is coming with great momentum. Our mission is to stop this momentum and bring back the momentum to the papaya side."

"Max seems to be better than ever at the moment," added Zak Brown. "So of course we take him very seriously in the title fight. It would be very stupid not to do that.

"We have always said that we will let them race with each other, as long as it is fair and respectful to each other," he continued. "You don't stop incidents in this sport, but it's about how you solve them together.

"We don't suddenly choose one of the two drivers," he insisted. "We may only do that when it is mathematically no longer possible for one person to become champion."

Of course, other than Max, another factor working to Red Bull's advantage is updates, which the Austrian team is still introducing on a regular basis.

On the other hand, McLaren appears to have given up on them, instead focussing on its 2026 car.

"These cars, especially our car, have reached a level of maturity in terms of technical development which means that we were definitely in the diminishing returns of our aerodynamic development in particular," said Stella. "For one point of downforce, it took weeks of development," he admitted.

"So when you are in this phase and you have a change of regulations, it's much more efficient to shift your resources and your attention on to next year's car, which is what we have done for a few weeks now. Because in one week working instead on the car for '26, you can add a lot of performance.

"So it really depends on where you are, in terms of your rate of development for this year's car and we were pretty much plateaued."

Of course, like Red Bull in previous seasons, as champions McLaren are paying the price of their success in development time.

"It's a decision that is an informed decision by looking at your data, by looking at, for instance, how difficult it is to add a single point of aerodynamic efficiency versus the resources, the time, even the usage of the CFD and wind tunnel that we know is restricted," said Stella. "The more successful you are the more your resources are restricted in terms of the teraflops that you have available in computer simulation or wind tunnel testing.

"So we need to use our resources in the most effective and efficient way which for us for a few weeks meant that we needed to focus on 2026. We want to keep winning championships in 2026 and this needed us to focus in this direction and make sure that we hit the track running with a very competitive car in 2026.

"There's a lot that we can still extract from the 2025 car by just optimising the set-up," he insisted. "In some of the last few races we left a little bit of performance behind.

"Like for instance in Austin, by not having done the sprint then we couldn't optimise the ride heights for the main race. So there's a lot of lap time still that we can extract from this car and we look forward to a strong final part of the season."

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