How McLaren has revamped its F1 team to become a contender again

McLaren has travelled a long, hard road this last decade, to such an extent that it had begun to look as if, however big the team’s ambition, it might never get back to what it considers its rightful place at the front of the Formula 1 field.

No longer. For this storied team has undergone a remarkable transformation this summer. From
openly warning at the launch of its car that it was going to be rubbish at the start of the season (a
prediction that was bang on the mark), since the Austrian Grand Prix it has had the outright second-fastest car in the field.

The statistics are eye-opening. Before Austria, McLaren’s average deficit to pole position was 1.127 seconds a lap. From Austria until the time of writing at the end of August, even counting only dry sessions and therefore ignoring the rain-affected ones in Spa and Zandvoort where it qualified second fastest and close to Red Bull, it was 0.235s.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has said McLaren’s upgrade – which focused on changes to the floor and front wing – had brought a second a lap. The data proves he is about right. It has been one of the most remarkable in-season turnarounds in F1 history.

From starting the season with one of the slowest cars on the grid, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were suddenly regular candidates for the front row if the second Red Bull driver Sergio Perez made mistakes, as has become a frequent occurrence this year. So how has McLaren done it?

French lessons

The story starts more than a year ago, at the 2022 French Grand Prix. McLaren introduced its first big upgrade package of the season and Zak Brown, chief executive officer of McLaren Racing, was disappointed. Brown says this was “a big moment”.

McLaren's disappointing upgrade package at the 2022 French GP was a big disappointment

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“We had upgrades, but the race was a non-event, and I didn’t like how we responded to that,” he says. “We were late with those upgrades – other people were bringing them to Spain. They were not that effective. And the response is where I thought: ‘Right, this is a problem. Why are we not all hands on deck on Monday morning, saying: ‘We’ve got a problem’?”

Outwardly, the big focus on McLaren at this point was over the future of Daniel Ricciardo. Behind the scenes, Brown “started having conversations of: ‘I’m not happy with what I’m seeing.’” In essence, he was beginning to doubt the leadership of the team at the highest levels.

Fast forward to the days immediately following the end of the season. Ferrari had removed Mattia Binotto as team principal after its championship challenge had imploded, and it wanted Frederic Vasseur from Alfa Romeo as his replacement.

Alfa – or Sauber as it really is – was in the process of being taken over by Audi for the German car giant’s entry into Formula 1 in 2026. McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl had already told Brown that he was going to join Audi after the end of his contract in 2025.

Brown had no doubts, and those who had come into contact with Stella could see why. The Italian is one of the most remarkable personalities in F1, intelligent, perceptive, thoughtful and eloquent

Rather than hold Seidl to his contract, Brown saw an opportunity and decided to make the move happen right then. The man he chose as Seidl’s replacement was Andrea Stella, who was promoted from his role as performance director.

Stella is a man who had operated under the radar in F1 for much of his career, despite having a series of relatively high-profile roles. He was race engineer to Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, and then followed Alonso to McLaren at the end of 2014.

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For some, this was a surprise appointment. Stella had eschewed the limelight throughout his career and avoided media commitments. Now he was being asked to lead one of the most famous teams in motorsport. But Brown had no doubts, and those who had come into contact with Stella could see why. The Italian is one of the most remarkable personalities in F1, intelligent, perceptive, thoughtful and eloquent.

Andrea Stella, who replaced Andreas Seidl as team principal, is one of the most remarkable personalities in F1

Photo by: FIA Pool

Brown says: “Why Andrea? He’s extremely hard-working. He is very committed to the team. His presence at the factory. He’s a great communicator. He’s a great listener. He is very tough, but very concerned with the team’s wellbeing. Here’s a guy who is willing to drive a performance culture, lead by example, work very hard, communicate, listen and just really create a great team.”

Brown asked Stella to “dig into what was going on”, and after a few weeks of conversations he concluded McLaren was wasting its best resources.

Stella is also a modest man. “When you ask me, ‘how have you done it?’” he says, “it makes me very uncomfortable to think that there is a single person. As soon as I think, ‘What have I done?’ I see the people around me. I see the team and the resources you have available, and then the first question is: ‘How do I use this incredible resource?’

“So immediately you start a stream of reflection on how do we get the most out of 750 people? And as soon as you do that, you start involving people who can support you in this process. So immediately it was always Zak, always on my side, my main point of reference. We have been in this
journey hand in hand.”

Stella also points to chief people officer Daniel Gallo, “incredibly talented as to people – and it becomes a three-headed conversation. There is nothing that is a single-person thought or action. This is an essence of my philosophy – just involve people.”

Reality bites

These conversations led Stella and the McLaren management to a realisation: there needed to be a fundamental restructure of the technical team, which in turn has allowed much more to be extracted from fundamentally the same group of engineers. Stella says that former technical director James Key was initially involved in these conversations.

“In fairness,” Stella says, “even in my conversations with James at the time, James was very honest in saying this rate of development isn’t good enough. There was a fundamental agreement as to the fact we were not developing fast enough.”

The decision was made for Key to leave the team and be replaced by a three-man technical leadership team

Photo by: FIA Pool

The decision was made for Key to leave the team. He would be replaced by a three-man technical leadership team focused on the key areas of F1 car design – aerodynamics, performance and concept, and engineering – all reporting to Stella, whom Brown describes as “a technical team principal”.

It’s an unusual arrangement. On the face of it, it seems to be a combination of two structures from recent history that manifestly didn’t work – McLaren’s own discredited three-man technical leadership team from the 2010s under Ron Dennis and Eric Boullier, and Ferrari’s structure under Binotto, when it initially didn’t appoint a technical director.

Brown says: “I felt very comfortable with Andrea. Without having a single technical director, someone needs to be the ultimate decision-maker. I thought: ‘Andrea’s perfect for that.’”

Once Stella had started the process of looking into what had gone wrong, the team soon spotted potential performance had been missed because a design direction on the floor had not been spotted soon enough

Stella says: “The fact we ended up with the number three is not because you target having three different areas. You start from: ‘How do you improve the development and delivery of the car?’ So you think: ‘What are the key areas?’ And then they coincidentally happen to be three.

“What’s the most important thing in F1? Aerodynamics. Right, in aerodynamics I want to have full focus on aero, led by the most competent person I can imagine from a technical and people point of view. This person, we were lucky enough, he was already in-house. It’s Peter Prodromou.” Prodromou, who was poached from Red Bull in 2014, had been sidelined under Key.

Stella continues: “Then you think: ‘Right, but I need to look forward. There is 2026 coming. There is a need to look from a conceptual point of view what others are doing currently. Good. I want to have someone fully focused on this and he only thinks night and day on concept and assessing performance.

“So we thought: ‘Who is the best guy from a conceptual point of view?’ And we realised that in periods of regulation changes, both times Ferrari had the best car, they won [races], 2017 and 2022. So let’s see what David [Sanchez] thinks about his future.”

Aerodynamics was a key focus for the team's reorganisation

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Sanchez, formerly Ferrari’s chief performance engineer, joins McLaren as technical director performance on 1 January 2024. Ask Stella whether he has concerns about the fact Ferrari was both times subsequently overtaken by a competitor – Mercedes in 2017/18 and Red Bull in 2022 – and he replies that this is less important than that it saw a defining design concept early.

“At the time [for 2022], they spotted better than anyone else that the sidepods have a fundamental role in powering up the floor,” Stella says. “That’s coming to the floor with competitive ideas. But you don’t dwell there forever. You have to have the horsepower in your team to say, ‘Good, what’s next?’

“It’s now 18 months into it and in 18 months you can change everything if you want in the car. You have competitive ideas and then the structure to evolve these competitive ideas, which is what we’re trying to achieve.”

For engineering and design – “where the ideas will have to become engineering,” as Stella puts it – McLaren again went in-house and chose Neil Houldey as the third head. But then it learned Rob Marshall – chief designer at Red Bull under Adrian Newey through and beyond its first successful era in the 2010s – was available. Marshall, too, joins in January, and Houldey will be his deputy.

Brown says: “Neil totally understood that when you get a guy of Rob Marshall’s experience and calibre, it was a no-brainer. Neil was great, and he’s not going anywhere.”

Stella had implemented his vision, but the immediate problem pre-season was that the 2023 car was a product of Key’s tenure. Once Stella had started the process of looking into what had gone wrong, the team soon spotted potential performance had been missed because a design direction on the floor had not been spotted soon enough.

McLaren decided honesty was the best policy and, when the media arrived at the factory for the launch in February, Brown and Stella put their cards on the table. The car will be uncompetitive, they said. But we’ve got a plan. There will be an upgrade around the time of the fourth race, and more to follow. Bear with us.

2023: floored thinking

McLaren decided honesty was the best policy and outlined at its media launch that the car would be uncompetitive

Photo by: McLaren

They have been true to their word. The first upgrade, introduced for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, was a modest one to the floor edge.

“It was conceptually a step up,” Stella says, “but it wasn’t necessarily a big step from a lap time point of view. “At Baku we were slightly more competitive, but then we went to Miami. Baku puts a lot of emphasis on straight-line braking and short corners.”

These are areas where the McLaren is strong. Where it’s weak is in braking-and-turning – always a problem with Pirelli tyres – and off-throttle cornering. In other words, the longer the corner – the more time a driver spends off-throttle or on part-throttle – the worse it is.

“Miami, long corners,” Stella says, “we realised we hadn’t changed things substantially. So in February we were not yet working on the Austria upgrade.

"If you get the most out of 100 people, it’s a lot of output, but you need to work on the right concepts" Andrea Stella

“This has been the result of the overhaul of the technical structure and Peter Prodromou and his aerodynamic group realising we need to flick into something more powerful here.

“Especially Peter; he had really valid ideas that he deployed. They put them on the table and the aerodynamic group, we talk about 100 people. If you get the most out of 100 people, it’s a lot of output, but you need to work on the right concepts.”

Second-step nerves

When Stella started talking about the existence of this second step, in the late spring, Brown was nervous. “I thought it was brave of Andrea, because he was pretty bullish with the media,” Brown says. “He was like, ‘Stay tuned for Austria.’ Coming out of France [2022]…”

Brown need not have worried. Again McLaren has delivered. The Austria upgrade – a fundamental redesign of the floor shape under the car, including entry fences, the floor edge and diffuser design, a Red Bull-style sidepod inlet and new external sidepod shaping – was a revelation.

The Austria floor upgrade was a revelation to the team

Photo by: Giorgio Piola

Still there was caution. “It is just the track?” Brown says. “We’re always pretty good in Austria. Lando’s pretty good around there. So it took a couple of races to go: ‘Actually, this is a substantially better race car.’”

The drivers say that the car behaviour has not fundamentally changed, it has just got more downforce, and they would like improvements in its areas of weakness. But all F1 cars are imperfect on the limit and can be improved. It’s a driver’s job to point out what those imperfections are. The team will work on them. But what matters fundamentally is how fast a car goes within those weaknesses.

“Expanding the horsepower of leadership”

Meanwhile, Stella has continued to make tweaks to the team to enhance what he calls a “high-performance environment”.

In Miami, two-time Indycar champion and 2003 Indy 500 winner Gil de Ferran was with the team. But this was not just a social visit from an old friend who had worked with Stella on McLaren’s immediate post-Dennis restructure under Brown, acted as mentor to Alonso on his Indy debut in 2017, and then helped set up the McLaren Indycar team.

Stella and de Ferran clicked back then and the Brazilian is on a multi-year contract as a consultant.
Stella says that he, de Ferran and chief operating officer Piers Thynne “form this kind of triangle which is ultimately like the head of the team. I then go hand to hand with Zak above us, but Gil, me and Piers, we are very connected, and we act almost as a single entity.

“The reason is we need to get the most out of 750 people. We have a 360-degree approach to improving McLaren. That is an enormous amount of work and it would
be impossible to do that travelling to races, and even if I
stayed at the factory.

“To make change happen accurately, and fast, you need to be present, to spread your influence very, very effectively, and pretty much every minute. So that’s where Piers and Gil play a role. It is expanding the horsepower of the leadership.

In de Ferran Stella has identified another key piece in the puzzle

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“Gil, most people know him as a champion in Indycar, but I know him for being somebody incredibly competent in motorsport, F1, strategic approach, people coaching. When somebody in the team has a conversation with Gil, they always come out quite inspired and like, ‘Ah, I think I understand now better what I have to do.’ Or with ideas, ‘I think I have a concept to work on now.’ And this isn’t an isolated variable. It’s part of having this expanded leadership, because otherwise your action is just too weak if you have a single person trying to do this.”

Friday favourite: Gil de Ferran on his favourite team-mate

The missing pieces

One notable aspect of McLaren’s revival this year is that it has happened while the team was going through the final stages of a major infrastructure renewal process.

McLaren has been using Toyota’s old F1 wind tunnel in Germany for more than a decade. The new one in the McLaren Technology Centre has been running since July but it takes time to calibrate a wind tunnel before it can be used for design.

"We see no reason why we can’t be extremely competitive in 2025" Zak Brown

When it is, it will be a multiple benefit. McLaren is no longer paying to rent the Toyota wind tunnel, so operating costs go down. It introduces operating efficiencies. And it is state-of-the-art, rather than a 20-year-old design. A new driver-in-the-loop simulator is close to completion. And McLaren has taken over its old factory in Woking and turned it into a new manufacturing unit, with brand new machines and a much better logistical process. All of which should add up to performance improvements.

Brown says: “Even though everything is in place now, 2024 has already started, so ’24 is a bit of a hybrid year for us. We’re somewhere in the middle of our 2024 car. Rob Marshall and David Sanchez, who will provide additional leadership direction, they won’t start until 1 January. So we won’t have everything at its full capacity until next year, which is the ’25 season. We see no reason why we can’t be extremely competitive in 2025.”

The team is already reaping the rewards of its hard work

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images