McLaren’s ‘perfect’ ending after being ‘on the brink’

Through six years at McLaren, through all the highs and lows sport can deliver, Lando Norris has always said he had the confidence that the team would get back to the top.

On Sunday, Norris’ victory in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, his fourth of his breakthrough year in Formula 1, justified that confidence and sealed the team’s first constructors’ championship for 26 years.

“It’s been a lovely journey,” Norris said. “To end the season like this is perfect.

“It feels wrong to say that McLaren have not won a championship in 26 years. Delivering that for the team has put the biggest smile possible on everyone’s face. This is the biggest reward you can give back to everyone who designs the car, builds the car, gets the partners.

“Everyone has played such a big part, so just proud. Proud is my biggest thing.”

McLaren are Formula 1’s second longest-lived team, and the second most successful in terms of race victories, in both cases behind Ferrari, the team they pipped at the post this year by 14 points.

So, “wrong” is certainly one word to use to describe a quarter-of-a-century gap since they were last crowned the best team in F1, a year before Norris was born.

It was close, in the end. After Norris’ team-mate Oscar Piastri was taken out of contention by a collision with Max Verstappen’s Red Bull at the first corner, the pressure was on.

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc worked wonders to move up from 19th on the grid to finish third behind team-mate Carlos Sainz, and one slip-up by Norris, or with his car, would have meant it was Ferrari who ended a long drought – theirs dating back to 2008.

But Norris and his team were perfect. And as the tensions of the longest season in history were released on Sunday night at Yas Marina in wall-to-wall smiles and a waterfall of champagne, team principal Andrea Stella, one of the key architects of their return to the top of F1, chose two others.

“Great resilience, great belief,” said the Italian.

McLaren have needed both in considerable measure to come through what they have to get back to the pinnacle of F1.

Those 26 years – and particularly the last decade, since Stella first joined the team from Ferrari at the end of 2014 – have been a period of remarkable turbulence at McLaren.

Stella had been race engineer to Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, and joined McLaren as head of race operations, after Alonso, who moved across at the same time, had recommended him to McLaren management as a quality person who could make a difference.

As Stella pointed out on Sunday, at his first race for the team, the car was five seconds slower in qualifying than Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, which took pole position.

Since then, McLaren have been through management turmoil, come close to going bankrupt, and a number of times been the slowest team on the grid – the most recent at the beginning of last year, Stella’s first after being promoted to team principal in December 2022. Just 20 months later, they are world champions.

As Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff put it: “When you consider where McLaren came from, if someone had said that to us two years ago, we would have said: ‘What planet are you living on?'”

The responsibility for McLaren’s turnaround rests largely with two people – Stella and Zak Brown, the chief executive officer of McLaren Racing.

It was Brown who started the process of recovery when he joined as executive director in 2016.

Brown secured the extra investment the team needed at the end of 2020 to get them out of a situation in which, as he put it in Abu Dhabi, they were “definitely on the brink – we were in a situation where we knew if we didn’t have a cash injection, we would have been at risk of starting the (next) year”.

And it was Brown, who was made CEO in April 2018, who saw the potential in Stella.

Brown believed this cerebral, eloquent, philosophical, understated engineer was the person to reverse the decline the team had experienced in 2022, when they had slipped to fifth in the constructors’ championship, after finishing third and fourth in the previous two seasons.

Up and down the pit lane, not everyone shared his confidence. But Stella’s leadership has been a revelation.

By mid-2023, McLaren leapt almost overnight from close to the back to become the team closest to dominant Red Bull.

And after a slow start to 2024 there was another great leap forward in Miami in May this year.

Since then, they have had on average F1’s fastest car. There have been bumps along the way as a newly reconfigured team have learned on the hoof how to compete at the very front. And a Ferrari team who have themselves been on an impressive journey of recovery have pushed them all the way. But in the end McLaren came through.

Stella thanked Brown, McLaren Group chairman Paul Walsh and the shareholders – the team is majority owned by the Bahraini sovereign investment fund, and the extra investment four years ago came from the US-based MSP Sports Capital – “for their faith in the change that gradually they have implemented”.

He added: “When you are trusted and start to be able to deliver the investments that were necessary, then you can compete at the top.

“The final bit of this circle came from unlocking the people. I am not sure if you can appreciate the meaning if you are not part of seeing such rapid progress of 1,000 people.

“But that’s what has happened, because you cannot achieve the standards, this performance, this reliability without every one of the 1,000 people operating at a very high level.

“That’s what we have gone through in 10 years at McLaren, but hopefully it is not an end point, it is just a starting point for more to come in the future.”

Amid the celebrations, there was also time for poignancy.

Stella was wearing this weekend a pin badge of the helmet of the late Gil De Ferran. The Brazilian former Indianapolis 500 winner was an inspirational but under-appreciated part of McLaren’s revival in two stints with the team in F1, first as sporting director from 2018-20, and then as an adviser from April 2023 until his untimely death on 29 December last year.

“Gil de Ferran was the first person I talked to when the proposal to become team principal came across,” Stella said, “because of his friendship, because of his wisdom, because of his incredible qualities at human level, his intelligence, and he was and always has been a great racer.

“To me it was very clear that whatever I was going to build, I was going to build it with Gil, and Gil has always been on my side.

“He was my adviser, my personal consultant, and if we implemented a culture, if we created the belief, if we were able to increase the standard to the level that was required, this is also because Gil was part of the process.

“So it was easy for us to dedicate our first victory in Miami to Gil. And he was always with us, I wear this in all the time when I am at the factory, and in the final race I needed to give a clear message to myself and to everyone that Gil was with us throughout the season.”

McLaren’s slow start to the season – they were nearly 0.5secs a lap slower than Red Bull on average over the first five races – meant Norris’ title charge in the second half the season, when they had the fastest car, was always likely to be a step too far.

But after finishing this season so strongly, McLaren will start next as favourites, and Norris is relishing the prospect.

“The one thing I’ve learned this year is probably to believe in myself a bit more,” he said. “I’ve certainly not come out on top as often as I would have liked in certain moments as a driver, you know, especially in my fights against Max.

“As much as it hurts sometimes, I’m probably happy about it now that I’m going to go into next season knowing that I can fight.

“I know myself, and I know more and better than anyone what I need to improve on, where I’m not strong enough, where I’m strong enough.

“I know that I have to improve in a lot of areas and certain things. And I feel like I’ve already done that quite a lot in the last three, four, five races. I feel like I’ve delivered some very strong results.

“But on the whole, next year is hopefully a year where I can go in and decide before the first race we’re going to fight for a championship.

“We’ve not ever thought of that. We’ve not even had the feeling of it from a team perspective and also for me as a driver. So hopefully next year is that year.”