Stella enjoying 'element of discovery' in McLaren journey

McLaren F1 team boss Andrea Stella says he's enjoying his journey with the Woking-based outfit and especially the "element of discovery" associated with his job.

Stella - who joined McLaren in 2015 - was placed at the helm of team papaya by McLaren Racing boss Zak Brown in the wake of the departure at the end of last year of Andreas Seidl who left the team to join Sauber as the group's new CEO.

Stella's first order of business was to put together an aggressive development plan for the outfit's MCL60, a car that fell short of McLaren's expectations at the outset in terms of its development cycle.

But parallel to defining the car's upgrade programme, Stella also made wholesale changes to McLaren's engineering department that included the exit of technical director James Key and the creation of a new three-way management structure.

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While McLaren endured a difficult start to its 2023 campaign, successive upgrades have delivered, as expected, significant performance boosts to the team since Austria, with Lando Norris claiming a pair of podiums in the last three races while teammate Oscar Piastri finished runner-up to Max Verstappen in Spa's sprint event.

"I’m enjoying the journey," Stella told Speedcafe.com. "I call it the journey because it starts from one point and you want to get to another point.

"I’m enjoying it because it has the element of discovery; discovery in the sense of understanding the team.

"When you talk about the team, we talk about all the people, 700-plus people, the mechanisms that you have at eye level as to how the organisation works, a lower level as to how people interact, what culture do we have in the team?

"Only once you understand all these with a great level of detail you can actually implement the right actions and transform all the team in what we call ‘world championship material’."

McLaren's three-pronged engineering structure is still in the making and will include three technical directors, with each handling a specific department.

Peter Prodromou will continue to be in charge of aerodynamics, while David Sanchez who will join the team from Ferrari at the end of the year will oversee car concept and design, with incoming former Red Bull engineer Rob Marshall handling engineering and design.

Furthermore, the revamped organization will be able to rely on McLaren's just completed new wind-tunnel infrastructure.

"So there’s so many elements and ingredients that you have to pull together and ultimately, for me as a team principal, I’m in charge of all this," added Stella.

"That’s what I like, that’s always done in my life; not in terms of team principal, but ultimately working in Formula 1, understanding what is important in Formula 1, how you have to build things, how you have to interact with people, how do you get the most out of people and what resources do you need and so on.

"So it’s essentially the same job but at a different scale."

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