by As a celebration of a sporting revival, McLaren could see this year’s British Grand Prix as the chance to finally return as a headline -ACT at Formula One’s Glastonbury. Lando Norris and Oscar Piatri will focus on Silverstone as overwhelming favorites. After more than a decade in the wilderness, there is real optimism that it finally comes home for McLaren.
Half a million fans in Silverstone are expected over the weekend, and although nobody counts quite a bit – not least because rain can play a role on Sunday – 10 years later than a Nadir for the team, the transformation in McLaren was remarkable. In 2015, when the current team director Andrea Stella, as head of the operations as a track surgery, entered Season 5.1 seconds in Australia and ended in ninth place the year.
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It almost felt like a fever dream for McLaren. The second most successful team of all times of the F1, then with 12 drivers and eight constructors that were reduced to the back of the network on the crack. It is difficult to understand how shocking it was to drive McLarens from Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, whereby world champion both struggling with a undermined and incredibly unreliable Honda engine, as if they had somehow lost overnight.
Despite everything that it seemed to be apart, there had been a long reform process behind the scenes, the learning in adversity started and last year in the middle of the season they finally found their step, whereby Norris Red Bulls Max Verstappen challenged the title. This season they have accused an intoxicating self -confidence that has won victory for the last time at the British GP in 2008. This was the last time the team claimed the driver’s championship.
More than 10,000 fans bought tickets for the committed “Landostaceous” in Silverstone this weekend in Stowe Corner to show their support, and the predominance of McLaren Papaya is overwhelming in the old airfield.
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At the center of this revival was Stella, which was by no means guaranteed in 2019 and was appointed Team Principal in late 2022. The Italian is a fascinating and gracious character, but above all a remarkably ingenious leader.
His career as an engineer, his attention to detail, the care requirement, can be observed in the simplest way. Stella sat with a number of telephones and recording devices after the race to face the press in the McLaren car.
The associated journalists are now carefully organizing their devices in the necessary order – as close as a team school leader has ever been added to tame a unruly horde.
It can be imagined through which its calm, calm, calm determination for precision has brought such powerful changes in McLaren. “We were 5.1 seconds away from the pole position in Australia,” he says when he looked at the last decade. “This is a number that I will never forget because I sometimes or I remember the team that it gives us a measure of how far we went.”
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Since Bruce McLaren founded the team in 1963 and they took part in their first general practitioner in 1966, they have become a fundamental part of the F1, which survived McLaren’s tragic death in an accident in 1970 and passed to an extraordinary success. But when they started in mid -2010, the way back looked terribly hard. The team was at best in midfield the season after the season.
Stella admitted that it was a discouraging task to turn it, but not one whom he felt particularly intimidated. The 54-year-old was a performance engineer for Michael Schumacher in Ferrari during the dominance of the F1 of the German, then for Kimi Raikkonen, including time when Finn won the title in 2007 Scuderia.
“It was the same when Michael Schumacher wanted me to be his performance engineer,” he says. “I remember that I thought it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. When I came to McLaren, I said:” Wow, that will be the most difficult of my life “and I said the same thing when I became a team leader.”
Nevertheless, he insists that he spoke in the same way in the same way, with a focus on attention on personnel and resources and a finely observed ability to best use them.
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“I take the framework and the approach and the basics 25 years ago and I think it is just a much more developed, refined and sharpened version of what happened 25 years ago,” he says.
“I was so lucky that I worked with really great people and I had the opportunity to learn from everyone. Like my years at Ferrari, I was able to learn from Ross Brawn, Jean Todd, Stefano Domenicali, Michael Schumacher, President Montezemolo and the designer of the car, Rory Byrne.”
In the F1 there was envious observation of McLaren’s revival. And for all the complaints that the team has bent the rules, they did not have it and it was taken as an honorary badge by the team.
Norris, who moved Piatri only 15 points in the championship and in the last round in Austria, went into the race on the back of a strong victory was emphatically in the role that Stella had played.
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“Andrea was one of the biggest keys and not only he, but also how he affects others and how others work on it,” he said. “With people and understanding of people, Andrea is very, obviously the best that I have ever seen. His ability to unlock potential from people and how to get the best out of a team is somewhat unjustified in Formula 1.”
However, Stella makes sure to highlight what kind of team performance this was and offers his appreciation for what he describes as 1,000 “excellent people and excellent specialists”. This weekend, the team may have said his long -awaited return to the top step, a remarkable comeback of a scale, but one that Stella is usually self -injured. “Sometimes I say I am a racing engineer who temporarily works as a team leader,” he concludes with a smile.
