That’s the assessment of the squad’s CEO, Zak Brown, who offered high praise to the Italian.

Stella took over as team principal at McLaren after Andreas Seidl moved to Sauber as part of Audi’s increasing interest in the Swiss team – a move first reported by Speedcafe.

Development targets were missed heading into the 2023 which led to a slow start to the campaign.

Stella immediately took control of the situation, admitting the team’s failings to the media but broadly outlining his vision to right those wrongs.

A restructure of the technical team followed and by mid-season its results had improved.

“Leadership,” Brown declared when asked by Speedcafe what that improvement could be attributed to.

“That of Andrea Stella, and of course his whole team – it’s not just one person, but someone needs to set the direction, the tone, the work ethic, the focus, the goal setting.

“Andrea has done a wonderful job.”

While McLaren has upgraded facilities as it heads into 2024, and a number of key signings, its gains during 2023 were found by much the same team as had developed the MCL60 in the first place.

“It’s the same people that gave us our car in Austria – they gave us the car in Bahrain. Brown said.

“But what I can tell you is that the people in Austria, it was a different team.

“And Andrea just did a wonderful job, setting goals, setting direction, bringing clarity, leading by example.

“It goes to show that, if you’ve got strong leadership, what you can get out of people, and if you have not so strong leadership that people lack focus or direction, not sure where to go and you put forward a suboptimal result.

“It’s a lot of people behind Andrea Stella, but it starts with him.”

McLaren heads into the 2024 season as arguably second favourite behind Red Bull Racing.

That assessment comes off the back of the tremendous and sustained progress the team made throughout last season.

Coupled with a maturing driver line up of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and the fresh ideas introduced from new arrivals in key positions, and expectations in Woking are high.

Indeed, Stella has admitted as much to Speedcafe when he suggested McLaren was one of four teams equipped to win the world championship.

“We want to do better,” Stella told Speedcafe on the KTM Summer Grill.

“The ingredients now have the potential to do better than fourth.

“It will be a long season, so we will see at the start of the season where we are.

“We are uncertain because we don’t know our competitors, how much they will be able to improve over the winter but if we take the 2023 season as an indication, after Austria, McLaren is the team that scored the most points after Red Bull.

“And Lando [Norris] is actually the driver that scored the most points after [Max] Verstappen.

“So it will be a terrific result to be able to confirm this second.”

McLaren has already revealed its 2024 livery, with the new car set to break cover on February 14.