The long term potential that elevates F1 2023’s star appointment 

Fernando Alonso grew bored with Alpine not offering a long-enough contract, so he signed for Aston Martin in double-quick time when Sebastian Vettel announced his retirement. McLaren won the court case to recruit rookie sensation Oscar Piastri. Haas thought Mick Schumacher crashed too often so recalled qualifying ace Nico Hulkenberg.

Last year’s Formula 1 driver market ‘silly season’ was especially turbulent. But of all the shuffles and switcheroos, 2023’s star appointment is surely found outside the cockpit.

When news leaked over the winter that
Andreas Seidl – the team principal who oversaw McLaren’s constructors’ championship climb from ninth to third, plus a 2021 Italian Grand Prix victory – was to leave for Sauber, it felt as though the team’s progress was in serious jeopardy. The chief architect had left, so would the Woking recovery plan crumble?

Not a bit, thanks to Andrea Stella, who appears to have great swathes of the paddock falling at his feet. Since taking the top job, his hair might have turned a touch more silver, but he’s presently F1’s golden boy. McLaren staff love that the new boss is one of their own rather than an external appointee. Stella, who joined the team in 2015, is a familiar face and his promotion has set an aspirational precedent.

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He is a captivating orator. Prior to promotion, he gave the media a wide berth. Then acting as executive director, Stella felt his job was solely to make McLaren faster. Time spent speaking into a microphone was time wasted. But clearly, the team principal role comes with a public profile. Now, his attitude is that talking to the media presents an opportunity.

When he sits down for a Q&A session, there’s no rolling the eyes like some of his colleagues, who do little to disguise the fact they’d rather be anywhere else. Instead, he is at pains to explain technical intricacies in detail rather than allow misinformation to spread.

Photo by: FIA Pool

Stella is a compelling speaker who has turned McLaren's fortunes around

He isn’t guarded to a fault, nor gets tied up in knots as he switches between agendas. Stella keeps it simple and tells the truth – at least as far as the boss of an F1 team can. He didn’t equivocate at the
start of the year. Stella made it plain that McLaren had missed
its winter development targets and would struggle out of the
blocks with the set-up he’d inherited.

It’s thanks to his dramatically overhauled technical structure that McLaren has transformed from that sorry state into a team which has the pace to make Red Bull sweat. The new hierarchy might appear needlessly complex with three heads of department (aerodynamics, performance, engineering), but that division of labour was conceived to give experts their own space in which to flourish.

He objects to being singled out for praise: ‘There’s no I in McLaren’, he would say. But as the new face of an upwardly mobile Formula 1 team, by default he is getting a lot of credit

Stella wants competing ideas to be presented and the best cherrypicked. It seems to be working. The on-track gains so far have come without the new wind tunnel but by better allocating the same resources available to the previous regime when designing a car that started the year abysmally.

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If Stella was to read this appraisal, he’d hate it. He objects to being singled out for praise: ‘There’s no I in McLaren’, he would say. But as the new face of an upwardly mobile Formula 1 team, by default he is getting a lot of credit.

As much as Alonso has done the heavy lifting for Aston in the points this season and his unrelenting determination has driven engineers to up their game, at 42 years of age, his impact as a driver will have a limited legacy. It’s easy to think that Stella’s candle will burn bright for quite a bit longer.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

McLaren is on an upward trajectory with Stella at the helm and things could get better still as new hires bed in and facilities come on stream