McLaren’s ‘perfect’ ending after being ‘on the brink’

Through six years at McLaren, through all the highs and lows sport can deliver, Lando Norris has always said he had the confidence that the team would get back to the top.

On Sunday, Norris’ victory in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, his fourth of his breakthrough year in Formula 1, justified that confidence and sealed the team’s first constructors’ championship for 26 years.

“It’s been a lovely journey,” Norris said. “To end the season like this is perfect.

“It feels wrong to say that McLaren have not won a championship in 26 years. Delivering that for the team has put the biggest smile possible on everyone’s face. This is the biggest reward you can give back to everyone who designs the car, builds the car, gets the partners.

“Everyone has played such a big part, so just proud. Proud is my biggest thing.”

McLaren are Formula 1’s second longest-lived team, and the second most successful in terms of race victories, in both cases behind Ferrari, the team they pipped at the post this year by 14 points.

So, “wrong” is certainly one word to use to describe a quarter-of-a-century gap since they were last crowned the best team in F1, a year before Norris was born.

It was close, in the end. After Norris’ team-mate Oscar Piastri was taken out of contention by a collision with Max Verstappen’s Red Bull at the first corner, the pressure was on.

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc worked wonders to move up from 19th on the grid to finish third behind team-mate Carlos Sainz, and one slip-up by Norris, or with his car, would have meant it was Ferrari who ended a long drought – theirs dating back to 2008.

But Norris and his team were perfect. And as the tensions of the longest season in history were released on Sunday night at Yas Marina in wall-to-wall smiles and a waterfall of champagne, team principal Andrea Stella, one of the key architects of their return to the top of F1, chose two others.

“Great resilience, great belief,” said the Italian.

McLaren have needed both in considerable measure to come through what they have to get back to the pinnacle of F1.

Those 26 years – and particularly the last decade, since Stella first joined the team from Ferrari at the end of 2014 – have been a period of remarkable turbulence at McLaren.

Stella had been race engineer to Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, and joined McLaren as head of race operations, after Alonso, who moved across at the same time, had recommended him to McLaren management as a quality person who could make a difference.

As Stella pointed out on Sunday, at his first race for the team, the car was five seconds slower in qualifying than Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, which took pole position.

Since then, McLaren have been through management turmoil, come close to going bankrupt, and a number of times been the slowest team on the grid – the most recent at the beginning of last year, Stella’s first after being promoted to team principal in December 2022. Just 20 months later, they are world champions.

As Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff put it: “When you consider where McLaren came from, if someone had said that to us two years ago, we would have said: ‘What planet are you living on?'” – bbc.com