Recency bias really can lessen the impact of certain achievements, and McLaren’s constructors’ championship success can certainly be put into that category.
Ever since a major upgrade took the team from point-scorers to race-winners in Miami earlier this year, expectations have rapidly grown to the point that it almost became viewed as a failure if McLaren was not to win the constructors’ crown.
A first success in 26 years is a huge achievement, but it also needs viewing in the context of where the team has come from in recent years.
When Zak Brown joined as McLaren Racing CEO at the end of 2016, the relationship with Honda as power unit supplier was strained at best. McLaren was pointing the finger at the Japanese manufacturer, and still living in blissful ignorance that it was a front-running team.
The switch to Renault power in 2018 exposed the truth, that the team was far from stable or operating at the levels required to produce a car capable of competing for victories on a regular basis. There were multiple arrivals and departures in the following years, a new power unit deal with Mercedes and a number of restructurings. I remember writing after the latest one – at the start of the 2023 season – that if this technical set-up didn’t produce results, then the focus would have to turn to Brown himself and the decisions he’d been making.
At that point, in early March, McLaren was enduring its worst start to a season since 2017. On pure pace, it was nowhere near the points in the first two races. After the eighth round of that season, the Canadian Grand Prix, it had scored just 19 points, and was 302 adrift of Red Bull.
Then it all started to click with an update introduced in Austria that catapulted McLaren to the front of the grid. Team principal Andrea Stella had been adamant there would be a major step forward, but this was a jump that few could even believe.
And the reality was that there was nearly a scenario where the team wouldn’t have been in a position to deliver the upgrade at all.
“We were definitely on the brink,” Zak Brown says of the end of 2020. “We were paying all our bills. But we were months away, and not several months – we knew we could make it through the year. But we were in a situation where if we didn’t have a cash injection, we would have been at risk starting the year.
“I needed to protect the team from them being aware, so everyone could remain in the very positive, energetic spirits they were bringing, because the team was progressing nicely.
“It wasn’t a comfortable place at all. But also I was always confident the shareholders would never let it get there. But it was also clear we needed the investment. I could put my head on a pillow at night knowing they would back us up if they have to. But it was going to be the ninth innings, to use a baseball term, before they brought in the relief pitcher.”
That pitching change came in the form of a near-$250m cash injection, primarily from MSP Sports Capital. Against that backdrop, having a car that won a race and took a pole position in 2021 was impressive. Having another that was a solid midfield runner amid the huge regulatory change in 2022 was just as much so.
But to do what the team has done since is pretty remarkable, and in a cost cap era, a significant part of that comes down to personnel.
“Andrea’s been brilliant,” Brown says. “I think it’s also about getting the right people. Because I think in any sports team, you can hire all the big names, and then we’re also seeing teams where you don’t have a bunch of big names punch above their weight, because they’re just an awesome team.
“So we’ve been able to create an awesome teamwork culture. When I joined McLaren, the friction between the leadership – and it was all kind of new to me, I could see a lack of respect amongst some of the senior leaders, and they blamed each other.
“I said ‘we’re all working on the same race car, so let’s work together to fix this race car. ’And now Pete Prodromou, Rob Marshall, Neil Houldley, Mark Temple, Piers Thynne, all those, of course led by Andrea Stella, they get along great. We do lunches, dinners, lunch in the canteen, laughing, we’re working together, so it’s a really good atmosphere.”
From the outside, that evolution atmosphere over the past few years has been clear to see. Multiple team members have admitted thinking about stopping working in F1 but failing to do so because of the enjoyment being part of this McLaren era. Approaches from rivals face a big ask enticing personnel away, such is the environment that has been created.
Lando Norris summed it up himself when reflecting on the success McLaren is having in Abu Dhabi, having become a McLaren reserve in 2018 and stepped up to a race seat a year later.
“We made progress, stepped back, made progress, stepped back,” Norris says of the initial years. “Nothing ever clicked, really, and never continued to grow. And it was hard just to break that barrier of getting close to Ferrari, Mercedes, and Red Bull, because for such a long period of time, they’ve been the guys who have dominated Formula 1.
“Now, not only have we broken that barrier over the last year and a half, we’ve risen to the top of it and to become the best team and leading. I don’t think, simply from the outside, people would give McLaren and my team enough credit for what they’ve done, what they’ve turned around, because it’s not an easy sport.
“It may look simple at times from the outside – and even I think sometimes things are more simple than what they look – but to go from where we were to outdo… Ferrari have turned things around a lot over the last couple of years and to catch Red Bull, which I’ve said a couple of times, and Max, who one year ago dominated every race. for that to flip around so much, we can only just give a hats off to the whole team, because a lot of things have changed.
“People have come and gone, and Andrea has done an incredible job. So to be part of this whole story, to be part of it not long after Zak joined McLaren and started changing things and making McLaren into a slightly more happy place than it was prior, I’ve been along the journey with Zak, and we’ve gone through a lot of things together, highs and lows and emotional times.
“So it definitely has been a longer rise to get to where we are, which has been fun and I’ve really loved it and I’ve enjoyed it. And I think the thing I’ll be proudest and most happy about is the fact I’m still here. The fact I’m still in papaya because I believed in the team for many years. I had opportunities to not be in papaya and to maybe go on and win races at an earlier stage in my career and those kind of things.
“I had those opportunities, but I believed and I wanted to simply do it with McLaren. I wanted to do it with the guys who gave me my opportunity in Formula 1. And as much as we didn’t think it was going to be possible this year, we were hoping for next year, next year was our kind of in-line target, on-paper target. The fact we’re doing it this year is an even bigger achievement.”
On-track, regulatory changes have certainly closed the field up, and customer teams are no longer at the disadvantage they used to be because the rules dictate they must get the same equipment as the supplier. But McLaren has created a new identity in the post-Ron Dennis era, become a team people really want to work for again, and then matched that image with a technical team that has rapidly developed a race-winning car, and a race team and drivers that have made use of it.
Even before a constructors’ championship provided the ultimate validation of the work being done, Brown knew he had something special beneath him that he needs to protect.
“Andrea has a phrase, ‘no poison biscuits’, which you can get inside a team or you can get the competitive teams rolling those poison biscuits in,” Brown says. “He’s got this winners-losers mindset. A loser’s mindset, something goes wrong, you start blaming everyone. We’re a team, and that’s what I need to keep together, because that is what the competition tries to disrupt.”
I’m not quite sure what goes into poison biscuits, but what is clear is that rival teams will be trying to understand all the ingredients that have made McLaren a title-winning team once again, because it has been some turnaround.