​Motorsport photoAndrea Stella doesn’t approve of chaos – or, frankly, any other form of imperfection.It’s already a well-known tradition even outside the paddock. The Italian’s media sessions are always delayed by a minute or two simply because he absolutely must sort out the mess on the table, created by journalists tossing their phones and recording devices onto it. He takes them one by one to create some form of structure, preferably symmetrical, placing them in order.Journalists joke about it – as was again the case ahead of his Saturday 7pm media session at the Hungaroring, the first this year after McLaren delivered its first – and the first for any non-Mercedes driver this year – pole position. But when Stella was offered to “leave it as chaos” this time as another exception, he immediately refused.“No,” he said with a smile. “No. That one is the only option that we don’t pursue.”And he formed a perfect square of multiple devices in front of him before the questions were allowed to start.
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It wasn’t the last imperfection that delayed the McLaren boss that evening, though, as the microphones refused to work reliably, forcing him to ask Luca Colajanni, the team’s communications chief, for a replacement less than a minute into his first answer.Then it happened again. And then again.When the red light started flashing on his microphone for the third time – perhaps signalling some form of super clipping – Stella directed his attention to Colajanni once again.“You’re trying to embarrass me,” he said with a smile. But perhaps only the people in McLaren’s communications department can tell whether he was joking or not. Word is, Stella doesn’t just let these little imperfections pass without trying to correct them and explain to his people why it should not be in McLaren’s culture to settle for anything less than flawless execution, whatever the process.Lando Norris, McLarenLando Norris, McLarenIt was execution Stella was mainly talking about on Saturday. It wasn’t McLaren’s pace alone that allowed Lando Norris to claim his first pole position as Formula 1 world champion – it was also the team’s execution that made it possible, as it was still Ferrari, according to the Italian, that had the best car in Budapest, at least up until that point.“When we look carefully at the data, we see that if we take the best corners of [Charles] Leclerc and the best corners of [Lewis] Hamilton, I think still they had the highest potential. And some of the results, I think, is also…” Stella said before his microphone refused to work again – and continued with a replacement. “It’s down to execution, I think. Execution from a team point of view, because we’ve been, I think, particularly diligent in finding some good countermeasures for the difficult conditions and good execution from the drivers.”The 2026 season is far from being perfect for McLaren, especi