How McLaren, F1 champions again after 26 years, went from last to first in 18 months
Andrea Stella shut his eyes, taking a moment to collect his thoughts and pick the right words.
An engineer by trade, the team principal of McLaren speaks with total precision. Every detail shared is well-considered. No answer is given flippantly or lacking proper thought, all delivered with a softly-spoken assurance.
Sat with The Athletic in his office at the Lusail International Circuit ahead of the Qatar GP, Stella tried to explain the evolution of his team since he took charge at the end of 2022.
“It’s like a child that grows,” Stella said. “If you see them in two months or in one year, you say, ‘Oh, they’ve grown!’ But if you see them every day, you may not see it. But in reality, they have grown.”
It’s a sweet, accurate way to illustrate the progression of McLaren during Stella’s tenure. From the inside, it has been a natural, almost invisible process — externally, its revival as an F1 powerhouse has stunned the sport’s establishment.
And on Sunday night in Abu Dhabi, the growth Stella described a week earlier came to a triumphant crescendo. Despite a scare when Oscar Piastri was spun around by Max Verstappen at the first corner, Lando Norris took a controlled win to ensure McLaren clinched its first F1 constructors’ championship since 1998 — before either Norris or Piastri were born.
It completed a remarkable turnaround for one of F1’s most iconic and, for the past decade, success-starved teams. Twenty-one months ago, after the 2023 season opener in Bahrain, McLaren was last in the constructors’ championship. Thoughts of winning races, let alone a title bid, seemed distant in a sport where the competitive picture can be rigid.
Now it has dethroned Red Bull, which entered this year off the back of the most dominant season in F1 history, and beaten the might of Ferrari and Mercedes to end its 26-year wait for a teams’ title.
He would never say it himself, but Stella has catalyzed McLaren’s resurgence.
When Andreas Seidl stepped down as team principal to take charge of Audi’s F1 plans with Sauber at the end of 2022, McLaren CEO Zak Brown immediately phoned Stella.
The Italian, who spent over 15 years with Ferrari in several senior engineering roles before joining McLaren in 2015, was always highly regarded within the team — and was already in Brown’s mind for the team principal role before Seidl’s appointment in 2018. When the time for change came amid concern about the team’s trajectory through 2022, Brown knew who he wanted. He calls Stella “the swan” for his calm approach.
Andrea Stella at the Abu Dhabi GP. (Pro Shots/Sipa USA)
Stella’s job was to return McLaren to the upswing it had experienced upon Brown’s arrival at the head of the F1 side of the company in 2018. It had long banished the misery of its struggles working with Honda in the mid-2010s, scoring its first race win in nearly nine years with Daniel Ricciardo at Monza in 2021. In Norris, it had unearthed a star it deemed capable of fighting for championships someday. Ricciardo’s exit after two difficult years led to the signing of Piastri, an exciting young rookie.
The promising driver lineup was set. Stella’s job was to stop the team’s performance from tailing off. Through 2022, McLaren had slipped to fifth in the championship, scoring over 100 fewer points than the previous year and managing only a single podium all season long. The remit for Stella was to change course.
It started badly. At the launch of McLaren’s 2023 car, Stella admitted the team had missed its development targets over the winter and would be on the back foot. A sluggish start due to a lack of performance and recurring reliability issues left McLaren last in the championship after two rounds. Norris later admitted he was “dreading” the rest of the season. The team didn’t record a top-five finish until round nine in Austria.
That 2023 race is one Stella picked out as a significant milestone in McLaren’s evolution. It brought the first in a series of car performance upgrades that put McLaren on the path to a championship, with more improvements arriving two months later in Singapore.
Thanks to McLaren’s huge step forward in performance, he became the most consistent challenger to the all-conquering Verstappen, while Piastri’s sprint race win in Qatar proved McLaren was ready to contend for bigger things.
Stella said the team made a “significant” step with its launch car for 2024, but Red Bull still dominated the early rounds. “It proved that that step wasn’t big enough,” Stella said. “We were back to being the fourth-best car.”
Any thought of fighting for either championship seemed fanciful. Stella moved to make further changes to the team’s technical structure, trying to make it more collaborative and have a better division of duties across design, aerodynamics and performance. “I think the changes to the technical department have been one of the most recognizable steps in this evolution,” Stella said.
It set McLaren on the path for the race that would transform its season: Miami.
‘Lando No Wins’ was a somewhat cruel nickname born in this age of easy memes and clout chasing. But, as Norris admitted himself to The Athletic at Suzuka, he understood why it had “become a thing.” He had yet to win a grand prix, claiming the unwanted statistic of the most podium finishes in F1 history without standing on the top step.
On a humid, early May day at the Hard Rock Stadium, Norris finally got his moment. A degree of fortune was required to beat Verstappen, as the timing of the safety car allowed Norris to pit and retain the lead. But the inherent pace of the McLaren car was evident. The upgrade package had essentially made it an all-new car capable of taking the fight to Red Bull.
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Race winner Lando Norris celebrates with his team in parc ferme after the Miami GP on May 05, 2024. (Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)
From that moment on, McLaren became a serious threat to win most weekends. Norris finished second at the next race at Imola, hunting down Verstappen in the closing stages and losing by less than a second before Piastri took P2 in Monaco behind Charles Leclerc. Canada and Spain were two races that Norris could have won, only to be denied on both occasions by some Verstappen brilliance in a Red Bull that was becoming trickier to drive.
The perception has been that, from Miami onwards, McLaren had the quickest car in F1, an all-rounder that could perform decently everywhere. Stella is eager to temper that thinking. He said the Miami upgrade “took us to being the best car in some conditions, at some tracks — not in all conditions and all tracks.” The emphasis on ‘some’ is a counterpoint the team has maintained throughout the year. Given the strength of Verstappen and the peaks enjoyed by Ferrari and Mercedes, it has always balked at the notion it was the outright fastest team.
By F1’s summer break, the idea of contending for both championships was becoming realistic. Norris had stabilized the points gap to Verstappen and, at last, raced him wheel-to-wheel in Austria, the fight ending in a collision. Norris always said it was a long shot, but he was ready to hunt down his friend. Unlike Red Bull, McLaren also had two drivers capable of scoring wins and podiums – Piastri was now a grand prix winner, scoring a victory in Hungary after Norris moved aside to honor team orders – that put the constructors’ title on its radar. Victory for Piastri in Baku helped McLaren move into the lead, erasing a 115-point deficit to Red Bull in just 133 days.
McLaren also had to handle the tensions and pressures of fighting for a championship against the fiercest of competition – growing pains for a team that hadn’t been in such a fight since the early 2010s.
The team faced scrutiny for its racing decisions, particularly surrounding team orders after the Hungary swap. At Monza, Ferrari snatched victory away after a battle between Piastri and Norris on the opening lap cost the team ground. It also faced pressure on the technical side.
Winning draws attention, especially from rivals. Red Bull started to raise queries with the FIA over McLaren’s adherence to the regulations. McLaren tweaked its rear wing, though it maintained it always complied with the rules and passed the necessary tests. (Red Bull also found itself in the spotlight for a front bib device, again making changes while denying it had breached the regulations.)
Brown knew Red Bull would bring the heat. “We’re prepared to go toe-to-toe,” he said at Silverstone in July. “Nasty is not how McLaren goes racing. I think you can go toe-to-toe, but you don’t have to be nasty about it. They seem to, at times, have a ‘win at all costs’ mentality. That’s not how we go racing. But we think you can go toe-to-toe and take the fight to them our own way.”
Stella embraced the challenge of fighting Red Bull. “You have to deal with those who are the reference, and we’ve got a lot of learning by doing so,” he explained to The Athletic in Qatar. “But it’s not only Red Bull. Like we’ve seen in Vegas, Mercedes performed at the level that they used to do. Ferrari, their trajectory in the constructors’ championship is impressive. You have to take into account the fight and the competition with all of them.”
Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris lead the field into turn one during the F1 Grand Prix of Hungary. (Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
The downside of that open fight meant Norris could not go on the kind of run of form he required to reel in Verstappen. The dominant wins of Zandvoort and Singapore were in isolation. In Brazil, he squandered pole and finished sixth in the rain, while Verstappen charged from 17th to first in the greatest display of his career. The title fight all but ended, and defeat was made official the following race in Las Vegas.
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Norris naturally felt disappointed and said there were areas where he and McLaren could have done better. But there is no sense of regret. “I’m still very proud of the whole year, considering we never went into it never expecting to be close to a constructors’ or a drivers’ (title),” he said in Qatar.
“I’m happy with the job I’ve done. I’ve beaten the people I need to go out and beat, and at the same time, (there are) things I need to improve but a lot I’ve learned this year. Maybe it’s a year too late and I wish I could learn some of these things previously. But some of these things you don’t get to learn until you experience them for the first time.”
Stella agreed, feeling McLaren could grow from each new flashpoint and adjust processes. It even comes down to simple things like having time set aside in a race weekend schedule for meetings about such issues as team orders in the event of a win — not previously a consideration, but now a necessity.
As a result, actions like Norris moving aside for Piastri crossing the line at the end of the sprint race in Qatar, returning the favor after the Australian’s assist in Brazil, came as no surprise. There is now an extra degree of planning there wasn’t in the past.
“We are now a stronger team — Lando is a stronger driver, and Oscar is a stronger driver — than we were at the start of the season,” Stella said. “And this is because we have gone through, like I said before, fast adaptations of different kinds.”
McLaren is a stronger team. Norris and Piastri are stronger drivers. But is Stella a stronger team principal? Even for someone so thoughtful, the experience of a title fight in only his second year in charge of an F1 team has exposed him to new pressures and ways of thinking. “It’s a good question,” he said. “I will use it to trigger my own reflections!”
McLaren’s future is bright. (Sipa USA)
On the left-hand side of the entry to McLaren’s garage, next to a large photo of Piastri, there are eight illuminated roundels. One for each constructors’ championship, honoring the success achieved in the past 58 years with drivers such as Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Mika Hakkinen, Niki Lauda and Emerson Fittipaldi.
Now, a ninth needs to be added.
McLaren’s constructors’ title in 1998 came courtesy of Hakkinen and David Coulthard, capping off a title double as Hakkinen claimed his maiden drivers’ crown. The Finn defended his title the following year, but McLaren lost to Ferrari in the teams’ championship. The same thing happened in 2008: Lewis Hamilton won his first title, but Ferrari clinched the constructors’. The fraught 2007 season almost ended in a constructors’ win, only for the team to be excluded over the ‘Spygate’ scandal that rocked F1, while its most recent near-miss came in 2010 when it finished runner-up to Red Bull by 44 points.
This championship has been a long time coming. Speaking in Qatar, Piastri was under no illusions what the title would mean to everyone at Woking. “There’s people at the team that were there the last time we won a constructors’ championship, but a lot of the team wouldn’t have been,” he said. “McLaren’s had some tough seasons in the last 10 years. So to be even fighting back at the front to begin with has been a breath of fresh air for everybody.
“To cap it off with a championship would really mean a lot.” Noting the associated bonuses for all the staff members, Piastri wryly added: “I’m sure everyone’s Christmas presents would also be a bit better too.”
Norris took heart in the fact McLaren’s title bid justified the unwavering faith he has shown the team, given the opportunities he had to jump ship to teams that might’ve given him a race-winning car sooner. “I had those opportunities, but I believed and I wanted to simply do it with McLaren,” Norris said on Saturday in Abu Dhabi. “I wanted to do it with the guys who gave me my opportunity in Formula One. And as much as we didn’t think it was going to be possible this year, we were hoping for next year, next year was our kind of in-line target, on-paper target. The fact we’re doing it this year is an even bigger achievement.”
The start of 2024 always made the drivers’ championship a long shot. Stella is as explicit as saying it was “not possible to compete for the drivers’ championship” as a result of how it began the year, given the pre-Miami races effectively gave Verstappen and Red Bull a head start. For McLaren to have overcome that deficit and come away with the championship is a remarkable achievement that, heading into 2025 when everything resets, will fuel hope of a successful title defense — and maybe a sustained drivers’ title bid.
“We’re going in more confident than we have been in the last two seasons,” Piastri said. “We’re still, what, three or four months to the start of the season, so a lot can happen between now and then. But I think we’re going in as confident as we have been in the last 24 months. We’re all hoping that we can start the season on the right foot because it’ll make life a bit easier for everyone involved.”
McLaren has returned to F1’s summit. Yet Stella does not see it as mission accomplished, believing there is still a way to maintain the stunning trajectory he has overseen, potentially making this only the start of McLaren’s latest heyday.
“I don’t see that this has reached any plateau,” Stella said. “I still think that we have a lot that we need to improve, a lot that we need to establish as competitors at the top of Formula One — especially in this unprecedented era with four teams that can win races, that can win championships.”
Unprecedented competition. But out of it, McLaren emerged victorious, grown-up, unrecognizable to where it stood a mere 18 months ago.
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Top photo: Andrea Diodato/NurPhoto, Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images, Kym Illman/Getty Images, CARLOS PEREZ GALLARDO/ POOL/AFP, Clive Rose/Getty Images; Design: Meech Robinson/The Athletic