MPH: McLaren leads F1 title race after ditching Ron Dennis approach

McLaren CEO Zak Brown recently gave his run-down of how he sees the remarkable turnaround in the team’s fortunes since the dark days of 2018 when it often was vying with Williams in fielding the slowest car on the grid. From there to leading the ’24 World Constructors Championship with three rounds to go is a remarkable achievement.

He puts much of it down to the leadership of Andrea Stella, currently team principal but back in 2018 the performance director, a position he’d assumed midway through that season. Stella had joined the team from Ferrari as part of Fernando Alonso’s crew, initially assuming the role of head of race operations. At Maranello he had race-engineered Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen and Michael Schumacher.

Stella’s first promotion at McLaren came in the wake of the departure of several senior engineers, who Brown held responsible for the poor performance of the 2018 car. He was promoted again a few months later to executive director of racing in 2019. But Brown now reveals that he’d actually offered Stella the team principal role at that time but he’d turned it down, not feeling ready for the role. It was a role he accepted at the start of last year after Andreas Seidl accepted an offer to join Audi.

Brown points out that the 2019 technical team of Stella, Peter Prodromou and Neil Houldey had produced the 2020 car which, in Mercedes-engined form, was a race winner and pole-setter in ’21. But the team took a backwards step in ’22 with a car created under Seidl’s watch with technical director James Key. Having lost faith in that combination, Brown approached Stella once more with the TP offer and this time he accepted. Prodromou and Houldey were essential parts of the technical team he had beneath him. So the gang was back together – and was later boosted by the arrival from Red Bull of Rob Marshall.

But it’s been about much more than that. Stella’s rise from race engineer to boss of a team on the precipice of a world championship has been fast and that has everything to do with how exceptionally good he is at creating an environment in which talented people can excel. As Brown said, around 997 of the 1,000 people who created the superb MCL38 this year were the same people who created the disappointing ’22 car. The difference isn’t one of resource, but of inspiration and direction.

Stella talks of how empowering the talent already there has been a cornerstone of his approach. He was very keen, for example, to release Prodromou from departmental management duties to creative work, which is where he excels. He was quick to recognise the quicksilver sharpness and boundless energy of Marshall and has leant into it this year. Stella is one of those bosses who knows his people and communicates with them until they share a joint understanding of the mission and how they are going to achieve it and how each of them is going to contribute. He has a very holistic feel for where to deploy resources in the cost cap, resource-capped era. He’s not a technocrat but combines his engineering understanding with an appreciation of the humans around him. The McLaren he and Brown are commanding could hardly contrast more sharply in feel with the Ron Dennis-era team which was of its time and vastly successful but which ultimately lost direction and in its final years became an unhappy place.

This version of the team is not yet perfect. It’s not been as operationally sharp as Red Bull this season. Time waiting for more data before making decisions could sometimes have been better used in just going with the imperative of the moment. Racing intuition is sometimes overruled by the scientific methodology – which can be a good thing in the factory, but not always in the field. But it’s a team still evolving and watching it do so has been one of the great human fascinations of this season.