Lando Norris has hailed Andrea Stella’s directing and production skills following his first season as McLaren team principal.
Stella was handed the reins a year ago following Andreas Seidl’s departure to become CEO of the Sauber Group, with the Italian stepping up from his previous role as executive director, racing.
Stella immediately overhauled the technical department, and whilst the initial few months were difficult due to the team being behind on its development plans, the results finally emerged once an upgrade was introduced on the car at the Austrian Grand Prix.
After scoring just 12 points in the first eight races, Norris’ results over the remaining 14 were second only to three-time champion Max Verstappen.
Offering “big thanks” to Stella for what he has achieved in a short period of time, Norris added: “It’s not everything just on him. You’ve got to thank other people in the team because they’re the ones who have done a lot of the work.
“But Andrea is the director of it all, the producer of the set, and everyone else is the cast. You need everyone to work together very well, and that’s what they’re doing.
“So he’s done an amazing job. I’m very, very happy with having him where he is. He does a lot for the team every weekend, in terms of racing and qualifying, and all of that, and I couldn’t ask for a better team principal.”
Norris did not anticipate the scale of the turnaround which was eventually achieved, with the team also outscoring Mercedes and Ferrari from the Austrian Grand Prix onwards, a point also made by team-mate Oscar Piastri.
Conceding that the beginning of the year “was tough”, and believing that would last throughout the year, the improvement in the MCL60 at Spielberg with the updates, and again with a further raft of new parts in Singapore, took him by surprise.
“We didn’t know how much we were going to improve,” said Norris. “Of course, we said we’ll be patient, and we know we’ve some decent things coming.
“But in the past few years, when you’ve had decent things coming, they’ve not always stood up to be that much of an improvement.
“This year was quite the opposite and turned out to be almost a bigger improvement than expected.
“But it was tough because you never want to start the season thinking, ‘Wow! I’ve 23 races to go, and I can’t even get out of Q1’. It just makes you think ‘Damn! It’s going to be a hell of a long year’.
“But what set us up very well is that everyone worked very hard to try and achieve everything we could with a bad car, which then set us up very nicely for when we eventually had a good car.
“I think we’ve been one of the best teams in maximising points every weekend, with reliability, and everything else on top of having a quick car.
“I’m proud of the whole team, that they did such a big turnaround, one of the biggest turnarounds probably in the last 10 years or something, in a time when it’s more difficult than ever.
“For us to do that against Mercedes, who dominated Formula 1 a few years ago for what? Five, six years? Against Ferrari, who have always been one of the best teams, and to catch up with Red Bull, who have had the most dominant car-team combo almost ever in Formula 1, and be close in some races to beating them, it’s quite impressive.
“So I’m proud and very happy. We didn’t expect it to be so good, and we know we can definitely get more out of it with a winter to go over things.”
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