McLaren go from busking at back of F1 field to Silverstone's headline act

The Guardian

4 hours ago

As a celebration of a sporting revival, McLaren might consider this year's British Grand Prix a chance to revel in finally returning as the headline act at Formula One's Glastonbury. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will take centre stage at Silverstone as overwhelming favourites; after more than a decade in the wilderness, there is real optimism that it's finally coming home for McLaren.
Half a million fans are expected at Silverstone over the weekend and while no one is quite counting chickens – not least as rain may play a part on Sunday – 10 years on from what might be considered a nadir for the team, the transformation at McLaren to put them in this position has been remarkable. In 2015 when the current team principal, Andrea Stella, joined as trackside head of operations they entered the season 5.1 seconds off pole in Australia and finished the year in ninth place.
It felt almost like something of a fever dream for McLaren. F1's second most successful team of all time, then with 12 drivers' and eight constructors' titles, reduced to flailing at the back of the grid. It is hard to understate quite how shocking it was to see McLarens driven by Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, world champions both, struggling with an underpowered and woefully unreliable Honda engine as if they had somehow lost their way overnight.
For all that it seemed to be falling apart, behind the scenes a long process of reformation, of learning in adversity, had begun and last year, mid-season, they finally found their stride, with Norris challenging Red Bull's Max Verstappen for the title. This season they have been charging with a heady confidence not seen since Lewis Hamilton last took victory for the team at the British GP in 2008, which was also the last time they claimed the drivers' championship.
More than 10,000 fans have bought tickets for the dedicated Landostand at Silverstone at Stowe corner to show their support, and the preponderance of McLaren's papaya colours is overwhelming at the old airfield.
At the heart of this resurgence, one that was by no means guaranteed, has been Stella, who became racing director in 2019 and at the end of 2022 was made team principal. The Italian is a fascinating and endearingly likable character but most importantly a remarkably astute leader.
His career as an engineer, his attention to detail, requirement for care, for order can be observed in the simplest of ways. Sitting to face the press in the McLaren motorhome post-race, presented with an array of phones and recording devices haphazardly strewn on the table in front of him, Stella would not begin to answer questions until he had arranged them all into a neat, equally distanced fan-shape, facing him so they were optimised to catch the answers.
Attendant journalists now carefully arrange their devices in the requisite order themselves – as close perhaps as any team principal has ever come to taming an unruly horde.
In it one can envisage the process by which his quiet, calm determination for precision has wrought such mighty changes at McLaren. 'We were 5.1 seconds from pole position in Australia,' he says as he considers the past decade. 'This is a number that I will never forget because sometimes I remind myself or I remind the team because it gives us a measure of how far we have gone.'
Since Bruce McLaren formed the team in 1963 and they took part in their first GP in 1966 they have become a fundamental part of F1, surviving McLaren's death in an accident in 1970 and moving on to extraordinary success.
Yet when they began to founder in the mid-2010s, the way back looked awfully hard. Season after season passed, the team embroiled in the midfield at best.
Stella admitted that turning it around was a daunting task but not one he felt particularly intimidated by. The 54-year-old was performance engineer for Michael Schumacher at Ferrari during the German's dominance of F1, then for Kimi Raikkonen, including when the Finn won the title in 2007, and as a race engineer for Fernando Alonso in his stint at the Scuderia.
'It was the same when Michael Schumacher wanted me to be his performance engineer,' he says. 'I remember I was thinking: 'This is going to be the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life.' When I joined McLaren I said: 'Wow, that's going to be the most difficult thing of my life.' And I said the same thing when I became team principal.'
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Yet he insists he has approached every challenge the same way, with a focus on personnel and resources and a finely observed ability to put them to the best use.
'I take the framework and the approach and the fundamentals from 25 years ago and I look and I think now it is just a much more evolved, refined, sharpened-up version of what happened 25 years ago,' he says.
'I've been so lucky that I worked with really great people and had the possibility to learn from all them. Like my years at Ferrari I could learn from the likes of Ross Brawn, Jean Todd, Stefano Domenicali, Michael Schumacher, president [Luca di] Montezemolo and the designer of the car, Rory Byrne.'
In F1 there has been envious observation of McLaren's revival. And for all the intimations that the team have been bending the rules, they have not and it has been taken by the team as a badge of honour, their rivals reduced to finger-pointing.
Norris, who trails Piastri by only 15 points in the championship and goes into the race on the back of a strong win at the last round in Austria, was emphatic as to the part Stella had played.
'Andrea has been one of the biggest keys and not just him but how he impacts others and then how others work from that,' he said. 'With people and understanding of people, Andrea is very, very obviously the best I've ever seen. His ability to unlock potential from people and how to get the most out of a team is something unmatched within Formula One.'
Stella, however, is careful to make a point of highlighting what a team effort this has been, offering his appreciation of what he describes as 1,000 'excellent individuals and excellent professionals'. This weekend his team might make their long-awaited return to the top step, a remarkable comeback by any yardstick but one about which Stella is typically self-effacing. 'Sometimes I say I'm a race engineer that is temporarily working as a team principal,' he concludes with a smile.