Who slept best last night: Andrea Stella

It’s the tiniest, almost unnoticeable details that sometimes tell you the most about someone. Whenever you see Andrea Stella in the paddock on a race Sunday, wearing team kit – a papaya-coloured jacket or a polo – you may spot a pin badge on his chest, always on the left-hand side. It’s a Gil de Ferran helmet.

“Gil was the first person I talked to when the proposal to become team principal came up,” Stella told us last year in Abu Dhabi, after McLaren clinched their first constructors’ title since 1998. "Because of his friendship, because of his wisdom and because of his incredible qualities at a human level, his intelligence, and he was and has always been a great racer.

“He was the first person that I consulted and to me it was very clear that whatever I was going to build, I was going to build it with Gil.”

It wasn’t meant for them to celebrate success together. De Ferran, who worked at McLaren as sporting director and then became an advisor, passed away at the end of December 2023, a year into Stella’s tenure as the team’s principal.

“Gil has always been on my side, he was my advisor, my personal consultant and if we implemented a culture, if we created the belief, if we increased the standards to the level that was required then this is also because Gil was part of the process.”

Andrea Stella, McLaren

It’s easy to cast Stella as the instrumental figure in McLaren’s rebirth since then. When Andrea took over, the team started a new season with one of the slowest cars on the grid and briefly scraped the bottom of the constructors’ standings.

Then came an incredible series of upgrades – the restructured technical department delivering big steps one after another. Whenever McLaren brought something to the track, it was not just a significant step but a giant leap forward.

In today’s reactive world, it’s tempting to draw a straight line: Stella is the difference.

That’s a statement he would disagree with – strongly. And it’s simply too neat an explanation. If you had to single out one element of McLaren’s success in recent years, it shouldn’t be Stella himself. It’s the team culture he helped build – even if that sounds a bit pompous or over-the-top. It’s the team’s values, its mindset, its spirit, after all. Even if the tip of that culture – the now-infamous “papaya rules” – has taken on a slightly cartoonish image by now.

It’s inevitable McLaren will keep being criticised for how it’s handling the title fight. The “team-first” approach may be great for McLaren, but it’s far less exciting for those watching than team-mates going to war for the biggest prize – banging wheels, pushing each other off track, firing shots in the media, splitting the garage into two camps, hiding telemetry, maybe even spoiling each other’s qualifying runs by lingering in the pit box.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

It’s inevitable the media – including the kind called “social,” for some reason – will demand that McLaren let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri off the leash and fight without rules of any colour. It’s inevitable that every tiny spark will be fanned into flames – a spiky radio message, a slightly slow stop. We can all keep telling McLaren to even stop trying to control it – because the championship pressure will blow it up anyway. But Stella won’t buy it. And you have to respect how consistent and insistent he is about staying true to the team’s values.

It’s admirable how calmly and effortlessly he swats away any attempts at external interference in McLaren’s business.

It has even become a ritual. Every time he faces the media after qualifying or the race, he sits behind a table full of recording devices and spends a minute or two rearranging them into a neat grid – so much so that journalists now come to these briefings trying to pre-align their phones and other, now slightly old-fashioned, devices. He’ll still tidy a few imperfections, cracking a joke as he goes, and then answer questions of varying sharpness in the voice of a university professor addressing students.

Oscar’s radio messages? No, not an issue, he says – quite the opposite. That’s exactly what the team asks of its members, drivers included: speak up, raise questions, open the discussion. It’s not Piastri raising his voice in defiance – it’s him doing exactly the right thing, according to the team’s values.

That was consistent with what Stella said after Silverstone too, when the Australian asked whether the team would consider a swap on track because of an unfair penalty.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

I may disagree with what happened in Monza. You may disagree with the way McLaren handled Hungary last year. Anyone with a funny nickname on any social platform may mock its approach. Yet it will always – Stella calmly insists – be McLaren’s decision on how to proceed. And that decision will always come after they “talk openly” and “learn” in order to “become stronger.”

As boring and unspectacular as that mantra can sound, it’s also commendable. Because it may well be the single element that makes this group of people – the ones Stella always calls “the men and women at McLaren” – so strong and successful. Not Stella alone.

One may still disapprove of the methods and the way McLaren controls its drivers – to the point they seem almost deprived of the right to elaborate on their vocal radio messages when out of the car, facing recording devices themselves.

Yet one thing matters most: the result. McLaren haven’t just won a second world championship in a row; they’ve done it this year with six rounds to spare. And one of their team members will almost inevitably be crowned drivers’ champion as well.

Gil is surely proud.

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