Lando Norris on McLaren’s long but ‘lovely’ journey back to the top of F1
Responsibility for McLaren’s turnaround falls largely on two people: Stella and McLaren Racing chief executive Zak Brown.
Brown began the recovery process after taking over as executive director in 2016.
Brown secured the extra investment the team needed at the end of 2020 to help them out, and as he said in Abu Dhabi, they were “absolutely on the verge of collapse – we knew they were if we didn’t “Without an infusion of cash, we are at risk starting next year,” he said.
Brown, who became CEO in April 2018, saw Stella’s potential.
Brown believes the cerebral, eloquent, philosophical and understated engineer is the man to turn around the decline the team has experienced in 2022. After finishing third and fourth in the previous two seasons, they slipped to fifth in the constructors’ championship.
Up and down the pit lane, not everyone shares his confidence. But Stella’s leadership was a revelation.
By mid-2023, McLaren has gone from near the back to being the team closest to dominant Red Bull almost overnight.
After a slow start to 2024, Miami took another giant leap forward this May.
Since then, they have had the fastest average car in F1. Along the way, the newly formed team has learned how to compete at the forefront, and as a result, there have been bumps along the way. Scuderia Ferrari themselves have gone through an impressive recovery journey, pushing them along the way. But in the end McLaren succeeded.
Stella thanked Brown, McLaren Group chairman Paul Walsh and shareholders – the team is majority-owned by Bahrain’s sovereign investment fund and Additional investment four years ago came from US-based MSP Sports Capital – “Because they have confidence in the changes that will be implemented gradually”.
He added: “When you are trusted and start to be able to provide the necessary investment, you can stay ahead of the competition.
“The last part of the circle comes from unlocking people. If you haven’t witnessed 1,000 people progress so quickly, I’m not sure you can understand the significance of it.
“But that’s what has happened because you can’t achieve this standard, this performance, this reliability without every single one of the 1,000 employees working at a very high level.
“That’s what we’ve been through for 10 years at McLaren, but hopefully it’s not the end but just the beginning of more to come.”
