It was more than just the race result. It was how the team went about it; the aggression and confidence behind the scenes all built on immense work ethic.
That’s the assessment of team principal Andrea Stella, who looks at the success as the culmination the McLaren puzzle pieces finally fitting together.
“It wasn’t anyone’s concession, it was something that we achieved out of our own efforts,” he told Speedcafe of the Miami win.
“Definitely, I would say at lest 15 months of hard work, where hard work is not in the classical sense of ‘let’s spend as many hours as possible at the best’, but hard work from a strategic point of view.”
McLaren started the 2023 season disastrously and only scored its first points in the Australian Grand Prix – a race notable for its high attrition.
But even then, the seeds of success had been planted. While the MCL60 was not a great car out of the box, it became one through a number of upgrade packages delivered during the campaign.
Those upgrades were designed by the same team that created the initial car, proving the knowledge and expertise existed but had previously been sub-optimally deployed.
“Right from the start, I think from some of us, key people in the leadership of the team, we almost came to the same conclusion: there’s a lot of talent, how do we use it? We need to make sure there’s a space for people, but what does it mean in everyday life?
“So there’s been a lot of hard work from, yes, designing many things, but also conceptual, strategic, organisational reflections and so on.
“In Miami, we kind of saw all this sort of ‘oh, wow, this has converged into a victory’.”
While Norris stole the headlines, Oscar Piastri was also on form that weekend, harrying Max Verstappen in the opening stages of the grand prix.
It was a performance that demonstrated the young Australian’s development as he chased Formula 1’s benchmark driver in its benchmark team. Were it not for a Safety Car, the result may have been rather different.
But it all pointed towards a coming of age for the organisation as a whole. It was fast, it was confident, and it was aggressive in pursuing results.
“It’s the result of our work and is a victory that we all own,” Stella reasoned.
“The effort to deliver the Miami upgrade was pretty unprecedented at McLaren as to the number of people that we needed to deploy to make it in time for Miami, translating the concept of ‘whatever it takes’.
“So let’s reflect on we did it, whatever it takes, to deliver that one.
“Then it was a way of reflecting on how did we do it? What are the key elements of our approach and culture which made that possible?
“While we needed to have a strategy when we were winning nothing and we were pretty much last, we’re now thinking like ‘how do we approach things now that we’ve won a race?'”
It was the Miami weekend that signalled a shift in that mindset, from a team in some respects still shaking off the hangover of early 2023, and the years before it, to become a genuine front running organisation.
Since Miami, either Norris or Piastri have graced the podium at every event in the team’s best run of results since 2012.
And it seems that there’s more to come. The development gains McLaren enjoyed in Austria last season have continued.
There were similar steps in Singapore and the 2024 car was also a handy step forward – even if others took bigger off-season steps.
In Miami, the upgrade was successful and a notable performance gain, but it was more than that. Miami was a Sprint weekend, leaving just an hour of free practice to assess, validate, and understand the new package.
To deploy a package in such an environment is a sign of desperation or supreme confidence. There is no doubting which of the two was in play for McLaren.
After more than a decade in the relative wilderness, McLaren is now a force in Formula 1 once more, with Miami arguably the point at which it made that transformation.
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