McLaren boss Andrea Stella has detailed how branching out leadership roles within the team’s technical setup has paid dividends in the 2025 Formula 1 campaign.
Since 2023, the Woking-based squad has been rapidly adding performance to its ground effects cars.
Last season, it hit a breakthrough with the MCL38 at the Miami Grand Prix – helping Lando Norris to his maiden win.
Not only did McLaren clinch a first Constructors’ title since 1998, but this season, the duo of Norris and Oscar Piastri have won 11 races between themselves, which sees the team comfortably en route to a championship double.
Stella, who has overseen the team’s meteoric rise alongside CEO Zak Brown, revealed how all of this started from a crucial decision about the team’s structure.
“The first step was to look at the team with a map, and understand what is world championship material and what is not,” he told Motorsport.com.
“But also, to identify who are the key leaders that will have to lead their own areas. And the final bit was believing in a model based on collaboration.”
The idea was to promote collaboration within the technical setup back at the factory. This meant the Technical Director role was split three ways.
“I still remember when we announced that we were going from one to three technical directors, there were so many questions about who makes the decisions,” Stella continued.
“For me, who makes the decisions has never been a problem, because my normal way of looking at things is so collaborative that who doesn’t have those kinds of attributes is just not, simply, at the table in the first place.”
Human collaboration at the heart of McLaren’s success
Both Brown and Stella also went on a shopping spree in terms of making key hires across the board at McLaren.
One of the biggest acquisitions they made was that of Rob Marshall, the man who was critical to Red Bull’s success, winning four titles with Sebastian Vettel and two with Max Verstappen, effectively as Adrian Newey’s right-hand man.
Since he arrived at Woking, he has been seamlessly inducted into McLaren’s technical setup.
“Decisions normally tend to be just a critical mass of information accumulated, rather than having a dictator that at some stage will make a decision,” Stella asserted.
“Zak and I believed that this is possible. And since then we have added Rob Marshall, which is then a fourth TD, and the dynamics have not changed.
“So, it requires a lot of presence, a lot of understanding of what’s going on in the business to protect this way of working.
“It’s the human interactions that give real meaning to what we achieve.”
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