How the chief architect of McLaren's improvement plans to continue its rise

Andrea Stella arrives for our interview with six pages of notes, and the thoroughness of preparation is obvious. There are sections, with headings. They cover the areas McLaren’s team principal figures we’re likely to discuss. And there’s a remarkable example of the emotional intelligence of the man who, since he took on his current role in December 2022, has masterminded McLaren’s transformation from
long-time midfielders to Formula 1 front-runners.

One of the questions planned was: “How do you go from better to best?” Stella has no way of knowing this. We’re a fair bit through the interview when it’s asked. Stella smiles and turns over a sheet of paper. “Look,” he says, pointing at a section heading in his handwritten notes. “Better to best.”

It’s hard not to focus on Stella when looking for answers to explain McLaren’s renaissance. Until this season, its last win was at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix, but that was inherited when title contenders Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen crashed together. The last time McLaren had been truly competitive was in 2012, several eras past. 

In 2021, McLaren finished fourth in the constructors’ race. It slipped back to fifth in 2022, at the start of the new regulations, which re-introduced cars with venturi-tunnel ground-effect designs to F1. And it was the failure of a mid-season upgrade package that year which persuaded Zak Brown, chief executive officer of McLaren Racing, that changes were needed.

When the team principal merry-go-round at the end of 2022 kicked into gear, with Frederic Vasseur leaving Sauber to move to Ferrari to replace the ousted Mattia Binotto, Brown saw his chance. McLaren’s then team principal, Andreas Seidl, had told Brown he would be leaving at the end of his contract period in 2025, to move to Audi in time for its entry to F1 as a works team in 2026. Brown decided to expedite the process. And the man he chose to replace Seidl was Stella.

The Italian, now 53, has been at McLaren since 2015, when he moved over from Ferrari at the same time as Fernando Alonso, for whom he had been race engineer at Maranello. Stella joined McLaren as head of race operations, became performance director in 2018 and racing director in 2019, one of a triumvirate of bosses leading the team under Seidl. He was made team principal in December 2022.

Brown credits Stella's astute leadership with being the primary factor behind McLaren turning its fortunes around

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Since then, the transformation has been remarkable. Not just the performance on track, but for the honest, transparent and clear way McLaren personnel – especially Stella – have communicated to the outside world.

From faster to fastest

McLaren started 2023 admitting it had missed development targets with its new design. It would start the season further back than hoped, Stella said, but progress was coming. Technical director James Key was removed shortly afterwards.

Come the Austrian GP around mid-season, the promised upgrade to the car was a revelation, transforming the team from lower midfield contenders to the head of the pack chasing dominant Red Bull. McLaren stayed there throughout the remainder of 2023, battling with Mercedes and Ferrari for the honour of being termed best of the rest. In Qatar, Oscar Piastri won the sprint race from pole position.

"Obviously it’s a team effort, but he’s led and driven the change. Andrea is the best racer I’ve ever been around"
Zak Brown

There was no obvious progress at the start of this season – Red Bull was initially still dominant, Ferrari had moved ahead and Mercedes slipped back, and McLaren was somewhere in between them. But again, it promised a step forward. And it came with a major upgrade for the sixth race of the season in Miami. It flicked a switch.

Suddenly, McLaren was up there with Red Bull. Lando Norris took his maiden victory around Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. It came with help from a safety car, but Norris and McLaren were definitely the fastest combination in the race. And they have been going toe-to-toe with Red Bull ever since.

McLaren was an average of 0.45s slower than Red Bull
in qualifying in the first five races of the season. From Miami
to the summer break, it was 0.046s faster, not counting
the wet session in Spa. What is the secret of this transformation? Brown is unequivocal in his response.

“The one-word answer would be Andrea Stella,” Brown says. “Obviously it’s a team effort, but he’s led and driven the change. Andrea is the best racer I’ve ever been around.

Breakthrough win for Norris in Miami was the precursor of what would follow as McLaren emerged as a regular contender at the front

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“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.”

Brown name-checks three key leaders – technical director, aerodynamics, Peter Prodromou; chief designer Rob Marshall; and Neil Houldey, technical director, engineering – and says: “All these guys are doing an outstanding job, but under Andrea’s leadership.”

But here’s the thing. Stella has been at McLaren for nearly 10 years. So the obvious question is, why has it taken so long?

Time’s arrow

“I can only answer for my portion of the stake,” Stella says. “What I’m doing now as team principal is just the derivation and evolution of what I was doing before, leading the race team or as a race engineer. It’s just an evolution, and at any stage
I was trying to apply what I think is the fundamental approach in the context I could influence.”

What Stella means by that is that he was doing the best he could in the position he occupied at the time. He’s a respectful man, and as he didn’t have the wider authority to try to influence the fundamental structure and workings of the
team, he didn’t try to. Once he did, as Brown points out, he acted fast, decisively and effectively.

“I don’t design the car,” Stella says. “I don’t produce the car. I don’t do the logistics – which have improved, by the way; even the logistics are much faster, much more racy, much
more than we had before.

“I don’t do the marketing and multimedia and so on. Of all the key individual tasks and steps that are required, l’m not doing any of them. But at the same time, it requires to
change a couple of key factors in this chain, and the chain
may cascade like dominoes.

“So if Zak thinks I have been the key enabler, he has surely good reasons to say so. He is the most incredible businessman and strategic person I have ever met. So must have accurate judgements from this point of view.

Stella is keen to point out the importance of the team behind him in lifting McLaren to the position of regularly challenging for pole position and wins

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“I answer in a different way because I can see I could have been the first trigger, but I was simply the first. If there are not 999 blocks after the first one, still the first one would just fall.

“So for me it’s in this sense of we’re all interconnected, and the talent and the capability and expertise were already in place, but for some reasons we might have missed some fundamental steps to get the dominoes to cascade.”

Those steps involved a restructure of the technical department, among them bringing back Prodromou, who
had been sidelined away from car design under Seidl and
Key, front and centre.

Flux vs dynamism

A renewed focus was put on the three fundamental pillars of car pace – aerodynamics, performance and engineering. There have been a couple of stabs at this, including the recruitment of David Sanchez from Ferrari to lead performance, and then his departure after just three months at the start of this year. The team remains in flux. Or dynamic, as Stella would put it.

Stella is too humble to talk himself up, but McLaren is well aware of what it has in a team principal who is an engineer who sounds like a philosopher

“In general,” Stella says, “I would say you need to have a
very good idea for what is the vision and culture for an F1
team that can compete at the front. And this needs to be shared with everyone. Everyone needs to understand the vision and the culture very deeply.

“But then the day you do it, you need to think: ‘What does it mean for the organisation? And what does it mean for the kind of people we need in the team? What does it mean for how we make the players work together?’ And as soon as you do that, you actually have to accept that this is quite dynamic. The talent you have; how do you make the players work together? Do we need continued modification of the organisation?

“These aspects which are more tactical, they can vary pretty dynamically. Because F1 is very dynamic and the context evolves and the players you have available are not necessarily the players that can achieve a certain way of playing or working but they would be very good in another way. And this can evolve over time as people grow.”

The beginnings of Stella’s journey to McLaren team principal can be traced back to Alonso. They had worked together closely through all the twists and turns of Alonso’s tumultuous time at Ferrari. When the two-time champion left Italy to join McLaren-Honda, as it was at the time, Alonso never asked Stella himself to join him there. But he suggested to McLaren that Stella was someone who could be a useful signing.

Sanchez (second left) departed McLaren after just three months, but it has not unsettled the team's upward trajectory

Photo by: McLaren

McLaren approached Stella, and he decided a new challenge and a clean slate was exactly what he needed. Whether or not Alonso had the perspicacity to predict Stella would rise to his latest heights, his insight into the qualities his former race engineer possessed was clearly keen.

“He’s an incredible person,” Alonso says. “First of all, a great engineer and a good team principal now. He’s a great man. People who are honest and do things with common sense, normally in life things will go well with them.

“Common sense will define Andrea Stella. He’s a great leader. And I’m not surprised that he’s doing an incredible job.”

Stella is too humble to talk himself up, but McLaren is well aware of what it has in a team principal who is an engineer who sounds like a philosopher. But it’s not just his communication skills or his insight
into what changes to make to turn the team around that impresses. It is the clarity and certainty under his leadership that really catches the eye.

One of the most striking aspects of McLaren’s revival has been how accurate it has been in its predictions as to when upgrades are coming and how effective they will be. Even Brown was a little concerned last year when Stella was predicting the Austria upgrade would mark a significant step forward, and yet it delivered even better than he predicted.

The same has been the case with the subsequent steps forward, which Stella compartmentalises as the Singapore 2023 upgrade, the 2024 car and then Miami. Equally, whereas some rivals have introduced new parts that have not performed as expected, McLaren has been working on a second major upgrade for this season, but had not yet at the time of writing deployed it.

Who’s better, who’s best?

Stella says: “The accuracy came because we sort of understood what we needed to see in design across the various environments where you design your car to say: ‘This
will give us confidence that this will work at the track.’ But one of the reasons it has become more and more difficult to develop these cars is that definitely they have started to become pretty complex.”

Which brings us back to the question with which we started – how to move from better to best?

Although McLaren is firmly in contention for the constructors' championship, Stella is clear there remains room for improvement

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

On the driver front, the team has no questions. Brown has long described Norris and Piastri as the best line-up on the grid, and sees no reason to divert from that opinion, even if neither are quite the finished article just yet. Quite the opposite; this year has only strengthened his conviction. Beyond that, McLaren as an organisation is still not at the level it wishes to be.

“What we’ve done at McLaren from a certain level to better is we identified the priorities and acted on them,” Stella says. “But when you want to become the best, the interesting thing is that, when you’re at a certain level, you almost don’t see up to here [he indicates the highest level]. You just find some easy opportunities, priorities, and you go to a certain point.

“But the more you grow, the more you create a clear reference like the best. But the gap is smaller, and in trying
to be the best, it has become more apparent what is next.

"There are many areas where we need to do a decent amount of steps forward. What we call workflows – and I don’t disclose what this is – we have many opportunities"
Andrea Stella

“The ‘what next’ for us is infrastructure. We have to keep adding capacity and capabilities. Tools – from a hardware and software point of view, we are behind. There has been a lack of investment for a long time. We are trying to compensate.”

Stella lists the situations in which things have not always gone to plan this year – such as handling strategic choices in wet-dry races such as Canada and Silverstone, both of which were potentially winnable and can be seen as opportunities missed; or pitstops, in which he says “we have plateaued a bit”.

“Where is the next step? There are many areas where we need to do a decent amount of steps forward,” Stella says.

“What we call workflows – and I don’t disclose what this is – we have many opportunities. We have all to be proven that we’re going to do a good job for 2026, because the improvements we’ve made are in a continuity of regulations.

Stella has identified pitwork as one area the team can devote attention to

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“There’s another element, which is the high-level political. We’ve not been on the top for a long time and we weren’t the most influential team necessarily. We don’t want to be the most influential, but we want to have a voice. How do you do that?

“And even the attention from the other teams has changed. And we’re more exposed to the media, which by the way for me is such a problem. Because you create so many versions [of events] that you ultimately lead on to chaos. You can devalue the power of having a truth by adding three different versions of the truth. This creates polarisation; this creates violence.

“Like, even the season of McLaren so far, you highlight all the mistakes. Where is the assessment for the other teams? We are more exposed. If we were P8, no one would look at it. It uses capacity/energy that I would rather divert on our high priority and keep everyone focused.”

Fighting at the front of F1 brings greater exposure to inspection of tiny details that may otherwise go unnoticed, which Stella has to tackle

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images