https://x.com/mclarenf1_news/status/2082556247723884853?s=46&t=4VdWJFleyhtiIEi6aUww1g
https://x.com/junaidsamodien_/status/2082447204883579139?s=46&t=4VdWJFleyhtiIEi6aUww1g
Stella’s statement. He also talked about both Lando and Oscar afterwards.
Quick context for this for everyone else: There are some claims that this statement implies or proves that Andrea Stella or McLaren "lied" about the availability of upgrades for Oscar's car. The anon provided these sources upon my request in the comments on a post about this.
However, outside of these two tweets which contain the same quote and one of which references the other as a source, I cannot fully corroborate this quote or the information it contains with any other source, which I would normally be able to do, as team principals tend to give multiple interviews after races and tend to repeat a lot of the same things.
That said, taking this at face value, I do not believe this implies that there was an inherent possibility of the upgrades being unavailable or that they lied about why they were not installed on Oscar's car on Friday. All we know is that they were delivered Friday evening, and the team had to rush a bit to get them installed by FP3 on Saturday morning.
This most likely implies that they arrived late. F1 logistics are a tricky thing, and in a double-header, it becomes even more complicated. They may not need to have arrived until Friday in the first place, and it's not uncommon to have one set of upgrades ready before the other, even if they're both meant to roll out in the same weekend. An understanding of how upgrade testing and proving works during a practice session demonstrates how this timing makes sense and isn't necessarily an indicator of a lack of transparency.
In FP1, Leo Fornaroli was driving in a rookie session and testing McLaren's rotating wing that is still in development. Generally speaking, you would want to test this wing on a known "good" platform. ("Good" here is relative and basically means race-proven.) This lets you get the cleanest data possible from the component you're testing. If they'd fitted the experimental wing to an upgraded car that they hadn't yet gotten ground truth data from, it makes it a lot harder to tease out what new thing is causing what effect. Since there was never any plan to fit the wing for the race in Hungary, there was no need to test it yet on the upgraded platform.
Had the upgrades been on location on Friday morning, however, they still would not have been installed for FP2. Aside from the fact that there probably wouldn't have been enough time, the team also needed to do direct A-B testing between the upgrades and the previous package without any interfering data from either the test wing or their less-experienced reserve driver. This kind of comparative testing proves the upgrades against the race-run setup under real-world conditions and makes sure that they behave the way the simulations say they ought. If something hadn't looked quite right with the performance of Lando's car, and no adjustments could be made to make it behave the way the simulations said it should, then there was the option to revert Lando's car back to the old setup. (Whether a team chooses to do this kind of testing depends on the nature of the upgrades, the circuit, and timing. Every other race McLaren have rolled out major upgrades so far has been a sprint weekend, which doesn't allow time for this kind of testing, but when the format allows for it, it provides valuable data.)
Since the upgrades appeared to perform satisfactorily on Lando's car, the plan to go ahead to install them on both cars proceeded. However, as the quote in the source says, installation had to be finished in somewhat of a hurry on Saturday because some parts didn't arrive until Friday night. As I said initially, this was more likely the result of an unexpected delay in the arrival of a shipment (which happens) that meant the team had to suspend or postpone the installation of the upgrades until Saturday morning so as not to use one of the team's limited curfew exceptions for the season, which are typically reserved for emergencies like rebuilding a car after a crash or diagnosing and repairing a major failure.
All of this is to say, the upgrades didn't need to be in Hungary until Friday afternoon, so even if they were meant to arrive Wednesday or Thursday, a delay wouldn't become any particular cause for concern unless they didn't arrive by Friday evening, which they did. So even though the team had to put in extra effort to install them (or finish installing them) Saturday morning instead of Friday evening, it didn't delay Oscar's start in FP3, and any kinks that needed to be worked out in that session were going to be there regardless of when they'd been installed.
McLaren tend to be one of the more transparent teams on the grid when it comes to changes in their plans throughout a weekend and problems they encounter. They don't reveal everything, for obvious reasons, but had the delay in the arrival of the parts extended beyond their ability to have them installed in time for FP3 as planned, it is something that they typically would mention, whether that meant a delay to Oscar's car being ready or the upgrades not being installed at all.
Bottom line: The potentially late arrival of some of the upgraded parts for Oscar's car did not impact the team's run plan for the weekend and thus was not worth mentioning outside of an off-hand remark after the race weekend was over. It does not automatically imply that the parts were not ready or that the team lied about why they weren't installed on Friday.
