McLaren needed to hit rock bottom to start its climb back to F1's peak

Twenty-seven years after clinching its last championship double in 1998, McLaren enters Formula 1's winter hinterland with both the constructors' and drivers' championships in its custody.

That the team managed to scale such a precipitous climb, given the nadir in which it wallowed during the mid-2010s, is an immense feat - made more immense by its near-crippling financial difficulties around five years ago. A loan, believed to be around £150m, from the National Bank of Bahrain helped to curb the losses in the short term; later that year, US-based investment group MSP Capital purchased a 33% stake in the team for £185 million - valuing the team at just over £550 million at the close of 2020.

When MSP (plus other minority shareholders) sold its stake earlier in 2025, it was at an undisclosed rate - but one that, according to various reports, valued the team at £3.5 billion. That's a near sevenfold increase, avenging the team's near-demise had the Bahraini cashflow injection not come to pass.

McLaren wasn't quite on its uppers two years before, in 2018; actually, the team had plenty of optimism over a brighter future. After the Honda experiment had failed to work, as McLaren's then-management team (Ron Dennis in his second act as Macca's overlord) had painted the Japanese manufacturer into a corner. With Honda's iteration of the V6 turbo-hybrid at least a year behind everyone else's powertrain in the development stakes, it was further handcuffed by McLaren's insistence of following a "size-zero" concept - namely, shoving the internal combustion engine, turbine, compressor, and other gubbins into a tightly confined space to improve the new car's aerodynamics.

After three miserable years, McLaren and Honda severed ties - using Toro Rosso as an intermediary to get its papaya claws on the Italian squad's supply of Renault powertrains. It rather demonstrated the position that McLaren was in: it would rather have a powerplant that Christian Horner complained about on a weekly basis than continue with the Hondas it had been duty-bound to run. Since the deal came late, McLaren had to shoehorn the Renault into the back of its new MCL33, a car based on the Honda-powered MCL32. Toro Rosso had to do the opposite, but it didn't mind sacrificing results for the sheer quantity of grid penalties that it took throughout the year as it embraced Honda's desire to experiment.

For those three years, the narrative had been that McLaren had produced competitive cars that were wasted by the shortcomings of the Honda in the back. As such, it made sense to zhuzh up the 2017 car and continue on that trajectory; then-team boss Eric Boullier had been unmoving in his assertions that McLaren's GPS data showed that the Honda was the problem. With a proven engine (or at least one that Red Bull could coerce into the occasional victory) McLaren hoped to demonstrate that it could return to regular points finishes, and maybe even collect a first podium visit since Kevin Magnussen took third - later upgraded to second due to Daniel Ricciardo's disqualification, which in turn bumped Magnussen's team-mate Jenson Button into the top three - on his 2014 debut.

McLaren's 2018 car aimed to turn the corner on its Honda nightmare - but ultimately contributed to a fraught year

Photo by: Sutton Images

In reality, it demonstrated quite the opposite: McLaren had lost its way from a technical standpoint. Reflecting on 2018's tribulations some years later, Zak Brown labelled it a "great wake-up call" - and precipitated many of the changes that led to its subsequent path to the title.

One of the knock-on effects of the late Renault installation was that much of the planned aerodynamic development for the Melbourne opener was delayed, given the early reliability worries it faced. This included its odd nosecone design, one with a narrower profile but parenthesised by two flow conditioners to minimise turbulence around the front end and energise the flow field around the front suspension members. There were also semi-regular bargeboard modifications, a rich area of performance as teams prioritised outwashing aero parts to drive turbulent wheel wake away from the floor.

At the time, squads were also experimenting with slots in the floor, something that allowed teams to almost seal the floors in with a barrier of high-energy outwashing flow. Many teams had experimented with rake - the inclination of the car from front to rear - to expand the theoretically available diffuser space, and maintaining consistent flow through it could strengthen the rear end.

McLaren had looked more likely to trail fellow championship winners Brabham and Lotus into oblivion, rather than enact its future return to the top

But McLaren struggled to build a stable platform here, as it had to rework many of its cooling components after pre-season testing exposed a series of problems integrating the Renault components into the car. Once fixed for the Australian Grand Prix, the Woking squad scored a reasonably healthy supply of points in the early season - but there was a further hair in the soup: qualifying performances demonstrated that the car lacked outright performance and stability. This was mitigated in the races as the cars weren't running at full chat but, once those aforementioned updates emerged in May's Barcelona round, Fernando Alonso had been able to break into Q3 for the first time that year.

McLaren scored 40 of the 62 points it scored in 2018 in those opening five rounds. Although the Barcelona performance suggested that the team had embarked upon the right direction with its new car, as had Alonso's seventh in Monaco qualifying, the team struggled to build upon that momentum. By Montreal, the seventh round of the season, the team was back to where it had started - or, perhaps, even worse off.

There were more issues beyond the change in engine. Brown, installed as CEO ahead of 2018, cited "legacy issues" as another factor behind the team's underperformance that year. "Lack of communication amongst the group, lack of clarity about roles, KPI [Key Performance Indicator] setting - all came from the past," he explained after the 2018 season had closed for business. "Not one single person was at fault, but when you have CEOs and team principals in and out, and racing directors in and out, it is hard to get a path forward. Specifically and technically, we now know what we have done wrong."

Andrea Stella, now team principal, had been newly promoted to the role of performance director in 2018 (after a three-year spell running the trackside operations) and was tasked with understanding those key technical limitations.

Stella was promoted to performance director in 2018, after three years as head of race operations

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Speaking back then, Stella had echoed the sentiment that 2017's MCL32 had been a solid platform to work from - but the developments over the winter had "embedded some aero issues in the car, creating a bottleneck, making development of the car very difficult". It's a far cry from today, where McLaren's patient approach to aero development has tended to result in updates providing a tangible performance benefit out of the gate. Perhaps Stella's exposure to McLaren's more troubled years has informed his approach...

It took time to identify those aero weaknesses, as they hadn't become evident in the wind tunnel. Outright, the MCL33 was - per Brown - producing less downforce than its predecessor, prompting the team to use the majority of its practice sessions over the second half of 2018 aiming to determine where the issues had lain. Stella's assessment that the "bottleneck" in aero gains was corroborated with an apparent lack of development; the team couldn't define new parts given the car's fundamental weaknesses, because it needed track time to work out what they were. It created a cycle, one that Alonso decided he'd have no further part in - the Spaniard thus 'retired' from the championship, electing to embark on a full-time World Endurance Championship programme with Toyota.

To offer a new perspective, McLaren thus completely refreshed its technical operation in the summer of 2018. Boullier resigned, chief technical officer Tim Goss left, as did chief engineer Matt Morris. Stella and the incoming Pat Fry (now of Williams) led the design of the 2019 car, with James Key joining that year after being drafted in from Toro Rosso. The late Gil de Ferran was also made sporting director in the tracks of the sweeping broom, and Andreas Seidl became team principal in 2019. The underwhelming Stoffel Vandoorne also followed Alonso out of the door, as Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris formed an all-new line-up.

Surely it would be too hackneyed to jest "whatever happened to them?".

A look at the MCL33's livery provides a stark reminder of where McLaren had stood seven years ago. The papaya livery, one that was incredibly basic in its design features, bore only a sprinkling of small sponsors; the Netflix effect was yet to kick in, and it was hard to entice multinationals to back a team that looked as if it had fallen into disrepair. McLaren looked more likely to trail fellow championship winners Brabham and Lotus into oblivion, rather than enact a recovery to the top.

At that point, McLaren had been sans title sponsor for five seasons after Vodafone left at the end of 2013. Now, with Mastercard inserting its name into the vacant title sponsor card slot, McLaren is unrecognisable from its 2018 descent into the void. It's not been an easy road back to the top (as its early 2023 travails will show), but its brace of championship successes completes the zero-to-hero arc that Brown and co would have scarcely dreamed of when perusing the team's accounts half a decade ago. There are some things money can't buy...