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The Brazilian racing icon enjoyed a hugely successful career behind the wheel in the United States before embarking on a second career in the management of the sport.
He was a senior figure within the BAR Honda organisation (now Mercedes) in the mid-2000s and joined McLaren in 2018 in the wake of Eric Boullier’s departure.
And while he may have left Woking’s F1 operation when his contract expired at the end of 2020, he left a lasting legacy.
“When we won our most recent race in 2021, when you actually unwind how we got there, that was of course the entire team, but the leadership at the time was Andrea [Stella], Gil de Ferran, Pete Prodromou, and Pat Fry who built the car in ’19, which we obviously raced in ’20,” explained McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown.
“The only difference between our ’20 and ’21 car was primarily a power unit change.
“So I give Gil a lot of credit, in addition to Andrea and of course the others, for getting us back to the top step of the podium.”
De Ferran died of a heart attack in the final days of 2023 in Florida aged 56.
He was a two-time CART series winner with Penske, in 2000 and 2001, and won the 2003 Indianapolis 500.
At the time of his death, he’d returned to McLaren’s F1 team as a consultant amid the restructuring of the organisation as Andrea Stella took the reins.
“It might not be apparent from an external point of view how integrated actually he was in our team, in running the team,” Stella said.
“He was very close to me, a direct consultant to the very senior leadership of the team.
“He was such a well-received person that he was definitely almost connecting fabric in some areas of our team.
“We carry his legacy because he contributed materially to the development of the team, to the turnaround we had in 2023, and to some of the projects, the transformation, the evolution we carry on to 2024.
“We carry his legacy because of the impact he had on each of us,” Stella added.
“I don’t know many other people that achieved so much but stayed so humble.
“He was definitely competitive, he was a hard competitor on track, yet this didn’t exclude not only respect for competitors but really deep sense of humanity.”
