While McLaren may have been left ruing opportunities it has had to deliver more Formula 1 wins recently, it equally is not blind to how far it has come.
From having started F1’s current ground effect era on the backfoot, and even struggling at the start of last year, its march to the front of the field to emerge as Red Bull’s most consistent challenger has been impressive.
Multiple factors have been at play to help it all happen. An injection of new leadership, a revamp of its technical structure, plus a cohesive development plan allied to having two super-strong drivers have all contributed to the Woking-based outfit’s return to the sharp end of the grid.
But for CEO Zak Brown, the single biggest element was the appointment of its new team principal at the start of last year.
Asked recently about what the secret to McLaren’s return to form was, Brown said: “The one-word answer would be ‘Andrea Stella.’ Obviously, it’s a team effort, but he’s the one who’s led and driven the change.
“Andrea is the best racer I’ve ever been around. So, while it’s now my eighth season, but I’ve been around racing forever, Andrea has done an amazing job of focusing the team, driving leadership.
“Obviously he’s not designing the car, so I wouldn’t want to not give credit to the other thousand people around him. But his leadership, that’s been the single biggest change that’s taken us from where we were at the start of ’23 to where we are now.
“Pete Prodromou, Rob Marshall, Neil Houldey, all these guys are doing an outstanding job, but under Andrea’s leadership.”
Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 3rd position, Zak Brown, CEO, McLaren Racing, Oscar Piastri, McLaren F1 Team, Andrea Stella, Team Principal, McLaren F1 Team, the McLaren team celebrate after the race
Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images
But while few would argue with Brown about how important a contribution Stella has made, the man himself actually sees things differently.
Rather than seeking sole credit for what McLaren has now become, he instead says the true answer for what has changed is more about simply getting the best out of what it had already.
Speaking in an interview with Motorsport.com’s sister site Motorsport-Total.com, Stella said: “The reason why 12 months ago we could deliver a quite a bit faster car than before in Austria is the people that work at McLaren. The 1000 people who work at McLaren could do that.
“My main contribution, and the contribution of this leadership team, was to think, how do we unleash the talent that was very apparent?
“It was very clear that we had a lot of talent at McLaren. And for me, this was also a reason to accept the position of the principal. It would have been a big challenge because clearly the team wasn’t in an upward trajectory. We were a little bit wobbling. But for me, one reason to accept was that, by knowing the people at McLaren, I knew there was a lot of talent.”
While Stella’s appointment as team principal in the winter of 2022/2023, replacing the Sauber-bound Andreas Seidl, was viewed as the turning point in changing McLaren’s trajectory after a tricky start to the ground effect era, the Italian thinks it would be wrong to not give credit to his predecessor.
In fact, he sees what happened to McLaren in 2022 was unrelated to the management at the time – and was simply down to the impact of a change in rules.
“As a team, you kind of needed to be equipped to manage the transition from a continuity of regulations to a new set of regulations,” he said.
“When you have continuity of regulations, you kind of almost accumulate knowledge in an incremental way. In a transition of regulations, you kind of start with no knowledge, and you need to generate knowledge from scratch, and I think this is where the team struggled.
“But some of the infrastructure, for instance, that came to fruition in 2023, was approved when Andreas was in charge. And many of the good things that we benefit now, they were put in place when Andreas was in charge.
“So, it will be an unfair and incorrect interpretation of the timeline and the history to think, ‘oh, everything was unlocked because there was this change.’ This is not true.
Andrea Stella, Team Principal, McLaren F1 Team, Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 1st position, on the podium with the trophies
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“It is an accumulation over time. I think, if anything, the main contribution we managed to give to the team is kind of this unlocking the people element.”
Fast forward to now, and all the contributing factors have got McLaren into a place where it can consistently fight for wins.
Its new wind tunnel and simulator are paying dividends in helping produce better cars, and the team is on a journey to make the operational improvements needed to turn what have been recent near misses into regular wins.
But for Stella, who said this week that there was “more to be done” and “we’re encouraged to keep improving”, there is no sense of him feeling the job is anywhere near complete yet.
“We are actually going through the what’s next from an infrastructural point of view,” he added. “This has to do with monitoring parts that come back for inspection. We need tools to check that the parts are good to go again in the car or not.
“We need to invest in machines that at the moment we are running beyond their nominal life with repairs. There’s a lot of things that still need to be done at McLaren to be competitive with some of the top teams that have invested steadily and regularly, year by year by year.
“And while they were doing this for 15 years, we have done nothing. So, there’s still quite a lot to do. And that’s also why we are prudent.
“We are doing well now. But we stay very realistic and humble because we are still catching up as a team.”
Additional reporting by Christian Nimmervoll and Frederik Hackbarth
