McLaren: Max Verstappen “the favourite” despite huge grid penalty at Belgian GP

McLaren refuse to write off Max Verstappen, despite his 10-place grid penalty at the F1 Belgian Grand Prix.

Verstappen qualified first so will line up from 11th on the grid.

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc is in pole position while the McLarens (Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri) are fifth and sixth respectively.

“Max, definitely a threat,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said.

“I think he’s been exceptionally fast in dry conditions. He was very fast in wet conditions.

“I think we knew that in this kind of track, still Red Bull were likely to have an edge on us. I think this was proven in wet, and to some extent even in dry conditions.

“He remains the favourite for the victory tomorrow, even if he starts outside the first ten positions on the grid.

“We have to look at ourselves. We have to maximise the fact that we were competitive as well. We have a tyre strategy that we are happy with. We do have tyres.

“We have to keep an eye on the weather, explore the strengths of the car, and hopefully gain a time advantage at the start.

“That means that even if Max made it through the field, we will be far enough ahead.”

McLaren impressed on Friday at Spa in the dry but didn’t change their set-up significantly for the damper conditions on Saturday.

McLaren have opted for a lower-downforce rear wing which they hope will help with overtaking, rather than adding downforce for the wet.

“We wanted to resist the temptation to prepare a car for wet, because we know that all forecast models at the moment are predicting a dry race,” Stella said after qualifying.

“And here in Spa, you need to have the right wing-level when you race in dry conditions because if you are short of top speed, it can be pretty challenging.

“So we stayed on the same wing we had in practice, where the car proved to be quite competitive in dry conditions.

“I have to say that when I looked after qualifying at the GPS overlays with some of our direct competitors, like Red Bull and Mercedes, Ferrari, I thought we would have a bit more top speed advantage. They are not on a wet set-up. I think they were just decently competitive.

“They seem to be also, at the same time, on a good rear wing-level so I don’t think McLaren can say that today we left some things off the table just because we were on a dry set-up, because we see that our direct competitors seem to be on a similar level of rear wing-level.”

Stella explained the difference between McLaren’s positive Friday and their underwhelming Saturday: “Like Lando said, I think we have used the potential of the car [on Friday]. So I think we appeared to be fast and competitive, but we need to see what the others are doing.

“This is certainly true against Red Bull. I think when it comes to the qualifying session, when it comes to Ferrari, Mercedes I think there were a similar path with us.

“Because if you take the strategy in Q3, we went out with a single set, with the fuel for the session while Leclerc took more risk. With the new set at the end, if the rain had increase, this would have been too risky a strategy, but he capitalised on the fact that he used new tyres and one lap of fuel.

“So actually, if you look at that, we are almost within the fuel effect between McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes, and I’m sure Lando and Oscar have a few points in their Q3 laps in which they can say like we’re doing a couple of tenths faster here and there.

“We are happy with this kind of competitiveness. [Friday], we seemed to be the first, in particular in terms of a long run pace. We seem to be able to keep a very high degradation for everyone, apparently more under control, but we will see [on Sunday] if we are able to do the same.”