De Ferran returns to McLaren F1 team as special advisor

Former McLaren sporting director and Indy 500 winner Gil de Ferran has returned to team papaya as a special advisor who will help the team with the next phase of its restructuring.

Former McLaren F1 team boss Andreas Seidl moved to Sauber at the end of last year and was replaced by Andrea Stella whose first mission was to conduct a full review of the Woking-based outfits departments.

The result of Stella's audit and analysis led to an extensive overhaul of Mclaren's engineering department, with technical director James Key leave the team and replaced by a three-pronged 'F1 Technical Executive Team', that will oversee aerodynamics, car concept and performance as well as engineering and design.

De Ferran, who worked alongside Stella at McLaren between 2018 and 2020, will act as a special advisor to the team who will pitch in during its next reorganization phase.

"We are going through a process of evolution and review of the team," explained Stella.

"Obviously, we have seen some major changes that affected the technical area, aerodynamics, but also we wanted to create more capacity at leadership level.

"There is a lot of work we are going through and a lot of work ahead of us in terms of identifying all the opportunities and capitalising [on them].

"We thought that as part of this process it would be really useful to have a further expansion of our capacity especially on some specific projects we want to look into."

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Stella made clear that De Ferran's role with the team is non-executive and non-operational.

"It is a temporary collaboration but it definitely goes over at least one year," said the Italian.

"Gil is such a valuable person to collaborate with that I'm sure once we have kind of made progress in the specific projects in which we are involving him, we will have some more ideas to further capitalise on this collaboration.

"Gil is not only very knowledgeable about racing, but is definitely strong in identifying talent, supporting talent.

“He's a great coach, is a quite brilliant strategic thinker and you can talk to Gil more as an engineer than as a driver actually.

"We are very, very happy too have him on board with us and being part of this exciting process of elevating, innovating the team at McLaren.

"I want to have a 360-degree look at where are all the opportunities, because we are ambitious in creating a very strong team.

"And in order to do that, with a team principal travelling to races for instance, it would be ambitious to think you can cover enough of what's required, so we wanted to expand our capacity."

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