Stella: We confirmed the progress made on Saturday.

      Immediately after the finish of the Japanese Grand Prix, Andrea Stella, the team principal of McLaren, commented on the results in an interview with Sky Sports, as Oscar Piastri was able to start in a race for the first time since the beginning of the season and finished second right away. Lando Norris also performed well, did everything he could, and secured a spot in the top five.

      Question: Sometimes during races, a safety car comes out on the track, which happened today. Do you think Oscar could have won this Grand Prix?

      Andrea Stella: Of course, it would be good to analyze everything first and check if he had such a chance, but at least today we were able to compete with George Russell, although it is clear that the Mercedes car is a bit faster than ours.

      But Oscar fully took advantage of his position as he was ahead of him. It seems that when Oscar got into a rhythm, he was able to hold off George's pressure quite well. Overall, we managed to overtake him, although it is unclear whether there was an opportunity to overtake Antonelli as well. All of this needs to be checked, but there is no point in guessing what could have happened and under what conditions. What’s important is that in the race we were able to confirm the progress shown in yesterday's qualifying.

      It’s good that we achieved such a result before the April break in the championship, and in the coming weeks we will work hard to improve our car.

      Question: Lando made a pit stop before the safety car came out – can we consider that 5th place was the maximum he could hope for?

      Andrea Stella: Lando had a good race. Towards the end, he managed to overtake Lewis Hamilton, as we mentioned yesterday that it would be nice if we could compete with Ferrari, and we did. This is a positive point, as Norris found himself in a less favorable position due to the team’s mistakes, since we faced various problems in the previous days of the weekend – I believe he didn’t even manage to complete two laps in a row before today’s race.

      So Lando did well too, as he was able to earn important points for the team.