McLaren's Renaissance Under Stella's Gentle Touch

Under Andrea Stella, McLaren F1 is seeing a renaissance, championing a collaborative and innovative approach.

Andrea Stella’s approach of not responding impulsively to errors immediately after a race weekend, as witnessed in Britain with the pit stops for Norris and Piastri, and his insistence that McLaren address mistakes as a collective, aligns with his broader strategy of technical and organisational structuring implemented in recent months.

Prior to the Italian’s appointment at the helm of the team at the end of 2022, McLaren F1 had secured only one victory since 2012 and had spent several seasons floundering in the midfield desert.

However, Stella, who has overseen the team’s resurgence to the top tier, attributes the current success to the creation of a work environment where staff can thrive.

A ‘gentle’ approach?

“One might say that, I accept it! The reason we were able to debut a car twelve months ago that was significantly faster than its predecessor post-Austria is down to the people at McLaren. The 1,000 employees at McLaren achieved this, not just myself, or one engineer, or anything. It’s gentle and collaborative.”

“My contribution, and that of the leadership team, such as it was, has been to think about how we might unleash the talent that was clearly already present at McLaren.”

“I didn’t do this alone, but in collaboration with Zak Brown, our CEO, Daniel Gallo, our HR director, Piers Thynne, our operations director, and Peter Prodromou, our technical director of aerodynamics.”

“This team also made me keen to accept the position of team principal. It was a major challenge as McLaren was not on an upward trajectory. We were struggling.”

“But I knew the people at McLaren and I knew exactly what talent lay dormant in this team.”

“When I looked at some of my colleagues from the aerodynamics department, I thought: ‘Hey, these are the same people who transformed a disastrous car at the start of the season into the fastest car at the end of the season in 2009’. And 2010 and 2011 were a seamless continuation of that. I was at Ferrari at the time and often wondered: ‘How do they do it?'”

“The talent was clearly already there. For me, the most important thing was to work well with Zak and the other team leaders.”

“How to unleash this talent? That was the fundamental question. And that was my contribution.”