Despite finishing fifth and seventh, Andrea Stella believes Sunday's race gave better insight to the McLaren's performance than qualifying.

On Saturday, Oscar Piastri was seventh and teammate Lando Norris eighth, the Briton admitting that while his car had the pace to be further up the order, he'd failed to put a decent lap together, while the Australian agreed the car had the potential to be quick, but was hard to drive and lacked pace.

Both drivers ran a one-stop strategy, switching from mediums to hards, Piastri on his white-banded rubber for 41 laps and his teammate for 40.

While the Australian held off George Russell for the majority of the race, Norris was able to work his way up to second, however he inevitably fell prey to Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.

Stella remains convinced that the McLaren had the pace to match Ferrari, which, for much of the weekend, appeared to be the car to beat.

"In the race we saw that what we said could have been the potential of the car was actually realised," said the Italian. "In qualifying we thought that we had a faster car than we actually were able to realise on track.

"Lando said that the car could have been good for P2," he continued. "I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration, because even if the potential was there, this year somehow it is very difficult to use the full potential.

"It gets a little bit easier in the race," he admitted, "because you don't push as much as you do in qualifying. You leave a little bit of margin, and the car was, I think, today as competitive as the Ferraris and Red Bull, while Antonelli seemed to be a step ahead of everyone else."

Explaining the strategy, he said: "The one-stop gives you the possibility to take advantage of a Safety Car, which didn't come.

"We are still waiting a compensation for what happened in Madrid," he added, referring to the timing of the VSC which meant that Norris was the only driver unable to take advantage.

"It will come," he insisted, "we also attempted to see what's left in the hard tyres, but honestly, we knew that it was very, very unlikely that we could have kept Verstappen and, in particular, Leclerc behind. With Hamilton, we thought it was more dependent on the final tail of the hard tyres."

Asked about upgrades, he said: "There will be some more stuff coming. Ultimately we will only be able to do so across Brazil and Vegas. Mexico, there won't be very much, but Brazil and Vegas, there will be some upgrades.

"Hopefully, this will help us to be consistently in the fight for podiums and hopefully start to lean on the level of competitiveness that is required to fight for the victory, so there's a few upgrades that are still in the pipeline."