It isn’t known whether Seidl’s contract included a payoff for McLaren. “There are ways to dissolve relationships where you can do things on very workable terms for for for everyone,” was Brown’s response when asked.
“And after we intended to go public [with the initial plan], the first person I was going to call to see if they would lead McLaren’s Formula 1 team is the gentleman sitting next to me [Stella].
“After some good conversations, Andrea kindly accepted the role, which then put us in a very comfortable position to move forward.”
Coming from an engineering background, Stella has a wealth of experience at the race track. Having engineered Michael Schumacher and Kimi Räikkönen at Ferrari, he then moved into more senior roles at Maranello before making the switch to McLaren.
The Italian, who is stepping up from executive director of racing to running the team overall, explained what he had learnt from the illustrious roll call of F1 principals he had worked under.
“When you can work together with strong personalities, very capable people, there’s there’s a lot to learn,” he said.
Stella is stepping up to become new McLaren F1 leader
DPPI
“Jean [Todt]: his incredible dedication to the team, and to his role, I think it’s something that gave me a bit of an imprinting of what it means to be committed early on in my career.
“Stefano [Domenicali] is definitely the people person – and F1 is about engineering operations, but is ultimately very much about people. I understood some elements and qualities that you need to take highly regarded as it in principle, and also some ways of interacting with people based on respect, listening.
“Andreas Seidl, we’ve worked if anything more closely, I think he also brought some engineering experience from previous periods – I think this was very useful for me also in shaping up the race team.”