McLaren’s turnaround rests largely on two people – Stella and McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zach Brown.
It was Brown who started the restoration process when he joined as executive director in 2016.
Brown secured additional investment at the end of 2020 to get the team out of a situation in which, when he put it in Abu Dhabi, they were “definitely on the brink – we were in a situation where we knew That if we had ‘no cash injection, we would have risked starting (next) year”.
And it was Brown, who was named CEO in April 2018, who saw the potential in Stella.
Brown believed that this brainy, eloquent, philosophical, understated engineer was the man to reverse the team’s decline in 2022, when they were the constructors’ champions, after finishing third and fourth the previous two seasons. I had moved to fifth place in the ship.
Up and down the pit lane, not everyone shared his confidence. But Stella’s leadership has been a revelation.
By mid-2023, McLaren had jumped from close behind almost overnight to become the closest team to the dominant Red Bull.
And after a slow start to 2024, there was another big jump in Miami this year in May.
Since then, they have had the fastest car in F1 on average. There are obstacles along the way as a newly formed team learns how to fight head-on. And a Ferrari team on an impressive journey of self-recovery has pushed them all the way. But in the end McLaren came through.
Stella thanked Brown, McLaren Group chairman Paul Walsh and shareholders – the team is majority owned by Bahrain’s Sovereign Investment Fund, and Additional investment came from US-based MSP Sports Capital four years ago. – “For their confidence in the change they have gradually implemented”.
He added: “When you are trusted and start to be able to make the investments that are necessary, you can compete at the top.
“The last part of that circle came from opening up to people. I’m not sure you can appreciate what that means unless you’ve been a part of seeing 1,000 people grow so fast.
“But that’s what happened, because you can’t operate at a very high level without every one of the 1,000 people having the standards, this efficiency, this reliability.
“That’s what we’ve done in 10 years at McLaren, but hopefully it’s not an end point, it’s just a starting point for more to come in the future.”
