'Time is right for McLaren to succeed in F1 — and Oscar Piastri is key'

As promising as he is, he is not in an easy situation. He’s coming up against Norris, who will be in his fifth season as a McLaren race driver, and is still very much on an upward trajectory. We’ll never know much of last year’s performance disparity between the two drivers was down to Norris’s brilliance, and how much to Ricciardo’s personal struggles, but many observers think that there was a decent contribution from the former.

Certainly Norris coped better with the MCL36, which appeared to take a lot of taming. He was often keen to point out that the car wasn’t exactly honed for his driving style, and like Ricciardo he too had to adapt.

Piastri will face a steep learning curve, but on the plus side the team went through the process of bringing on a rookie as recently as 2019 with Norris, so that knowledge will help.

“Piastri will have enough talent, process and intelligence to find his own way”

As well as having to focus some of its energies on educating its new guy, the team will miss the feedback it would get from having two experienced drivers. For all his struggles Ricciardo brought a great deal of useful knowledge to the party. However the team remains confident that it can successfully address that issue of Piastri’s inexperience.

“I think the important point is to have continuity with Lando, he keeps the kind of reference,” Stella said at the end of last year.

“And it’s a reference that we know very well, because we have gone through the development of Lando together with him. And there has certainly been a development from a technical point of view, from a driving point of view, racecraft point of view.

“So I think we know this very well. It will become a frame of reference for Oscar as well. And this is in terms of not only Oscar’s performance himself, but also understanding the car.”

Key says these days data often trumps driver feedback: “We will have a new car, we want to improve some of the things, and drivers are certainly important in relation to that, even though F1, unlike some other sports, relies a lot on numbers, which means we are lucky, as people dealing with that. I think if it was a motorbike, it would be more difficult to understand what is the role of the rider here? What is the role of the bike?

“But in F1, you pretty much get a very good idea from the numbers, what your competitiveness is. With the drivers, you deal with subtleties, the final percentage of your performance, so I wouldn’t be too scared. If you give me good numbers, I will take it, even if we don’t have very clear references from the drivers.

“Saying that, the journey we want to take with Oscar is also an independent journey. He’s certainly very talented. And we want him to use his references, references from the car, references, even from what we learned with Daniel and so on.

“But we are quite adamant that he will have enough talent, process, intelligence to kind of find his own way, taking advantage of these references. So not very concerned at all that we may lose this kind of experience in terms of comparison.”

The team has made good progress since the Honda days, and technical director James Key has played a big role in that. Under Seidl he helped to put together the plan to rebuild things after the low of the Honda era, and the main focus was on infrastructure, including a new wind tunnel. That is not yet in use, but a lot of other work has been done.

“We’re not there yet,” says Key. “But I guess we’re more dependent on what we plan to do. In 2019, Andreas and I arrived, we said immediately, right, we’ve got some infrastructure to put in here, because we’re out of date.

“We had an expansion plan for some of the key areas. And then a pandemic kind of hit the world. And all of that came to a stop. So we haven’t reaped the rewards of any of those infrastructure investments yet, they’re still happening, they’re 18 months behind. And the expansion plan had to stop.

“And now we’re rejigging that now we’re in the cost cap, and we’re recruiting quite heavily, again, in the key performance areas. So I think plans like that, which were kind of long-term but made very early, are well behind schedule. So we’re still waiting for them.”

While not everything is in place as yet Key is adamant that good progress has been made, and that was evident last year as the team wrestled with the challenge of the new regulations.

“It’s such a different car, on exactly where we are in each area, on which bits worked and which bits were a bit weak,” he says. “And obviously, we’ve been discussing it and improving upon them as we go. So I think we’re still in that journey. We’re not at the bottom of the mountain, we’re sort of halfway up I would say, whilst we wait for the infrastructure stuff.

“But having said that we’re looking at this route very realistically, and [the 2023] car and the year after and the year after all have a plan associated with them in line with each of the steps that are coming. So when the wind tunnel’s online, we know exactly how we’re going to be using it, what we’re going to bias towards, which car is going to benefit from it most, and other things in a similar way.

“So we’re not sort of hanging on waiting for anything. We’re not lost, we’ve got a very clear plan. It’s just patience in F1 is short and sometimes you have to have a bit of patience for these big projects to kick in.”

While Key was responsible developing the technical infrastructure Stella was the man who, under Seidl’s leadership, was charged with bringing the race team up to scratch. It says a lot about what he’s achieved that when Seidl decided he was going, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown decided that he didn’t need to look outside for a successor, and that Stella could step up.

In retrospect what he said at the end of last season – before we knew that he was being promoted – suggested that he will make a good boss, someone who puts his people first.

“Independently of the on-track results there’s a journey that happens in developing a race team,” he noted.

“There are some technical aspects, operational, pitstops. There’s also some aspects which become more and more relevant in the current context of the F1 calendar, which is the wellbeing of people, logistics, efficiency of how you go racing in relation to costs.

“So in all those areas, we had some targets in terms of improvement. Targets that you achieve even by fine tuning the organisation, developing the talent, selecting the leaders, putting in place the right practice for training, and so on.”

Stella certainly believes that the team is in a good place at the moment,

“I think the guys worked much more confidently, supporting each other,” he said. “I think the McLaren garage is a nice environment to be. And having been in F1 for a long time, being in an F1 garage and being in a place in which there are strong values, a good community, a nice place to be, not necessarily the two things go together.

“So there’s a lot more than results. And that’s cost and development that we are going through. And I think in this respect, we are happy.”