Andrea Stella says McLaren is still extremely early in its journey under his leadership as team principal, despite winning the past two constructors’ championships.
McLaren showed signs of clear progress in 2023 – the first year with Stella in charge – before winning the constructors’ championship in 2024 and defending that title again this year. The most recent success has come with six rounds of the season still remaining, and while Stella says there are a number of emotions that come with winning a championship, he feels McLaren is not the finished product.
“It’s sweet, it’s happiness, it’s pride,” Stella (pictured above celebrating the constructors’ crown with the team in Singapore) told SiriusXM when asked to describe his feelings. “Pride because we are contributing to the legacy of the McLaren Formula 1 team, having achieved the constructors’ world championship last year, which in itself looked almost unbelievable when we started the journey.
“It’s such a young journey – it’s only three years in and we’ve now claimed two titles in the constructors’. It’s great to see all the trophies going in the cabinet step-by-step at McLaren. So it makes me particularly proud when I see things from this perspective, in the historic perspective, and I just want to share it with the team.
“All this has been made possible by the men and women at McLaren and the fact that they wanted to embrace the journey. It was ultimately their choice and they made the choice, joining with dedication, with belief, with the concept that we will have to enjoy the journey step by step and make sure that we keep building every day and don’t look too far ahead – [if we] just add one brick every day to the construction, we will go very far.”
With McLaren pulling further clear of the field this season despite it being the final year of regulations, Stella says the team’s bold approach to its new car is something that is often overlooked.
“We focus on the journey, we focus on building one brick every day, so you don’t think too much about the final destination,” he said. “Last year at some stage we realized we could become champions and we acknowledged that and we kept building, and this year we realized that the car was even more competitive, but we just focused on one race at a time.
“For me a key step has been the fact that last year when we needed to approach the car for 2025, we decided to be brave and we decided to go for innovation in pretty much every area, even if that [2024 McLaren] was already a pretty competitive car.
“So I have to praise the bravery in our engineering department, because some of the solutions that we implemented, they were challenging our leading edge of knowledge.
“It wasn’t in the comfort zone certainly from a design or a manufacturing point of view as to what we wanted to achieve, but this ultimately became a reliable car and it became a fast car. So if anything this was almost a turning point that maybe we haven’t talked enough about, but that was a point of of which I think everyone should be very proud at McLaren.”
