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Andrea Stella has become the only team principal to lead McLaren to a championship double this century.
McLaren will be hoping that Andrea Stella doesn’t step down as quickly as Ron Dennis did following Lewis Hamilton’s title win in 2008, after the team’s incredible improvement over the past three years.
When Oscar Piastri first joined McLaren, he and Lando Norris were battling to get out of Q1.
By the time the 2025 season rolled around, they were fighting for the drivers’ championship, with Norris coming out on top at the final race of the year.
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Stella initially didn’t want to become McLaren team principal, and took plenty of convincing from CEO Zak Brown to eventually replace Andreas Seidl.
However, former Ferrari legend Rubens Barrichello has been speaking about Stella and how he knew from his time working with Michael Schumacher that he would be a success at McLaren.
Schumacher enjoyed unprecedented success with the Scuderia, and Stella played a crucial role in his five consecutive championships.
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Michael Schumacher relied on Andrea Stella during the peak of his success at Ferrari
Barrichello was speaking about his time at Ferrari on the Flow Podcast.
When talking about the dynamic between himself and Schumacher, he said: “So, they kept improving, and Andrea Stella, who’s the boss there today, the guy who does everything, he was a telemetry engineer [at Ferrari].
“There’s a mechanical engineer and a computer engineer, right? Downloading all the data, that stuff, analysing graphs and everything.
“He was Schumacher’s engineer, right? And I paid close attention to what he did.
“My guy was good, but this guy was, oh, you could see where he was going.
“So, I’m a guy who pays attention. I like to learn, right? I think I already told you.
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“Often, Schumacher would end the meeting, they would go somewhere else and not call me, I would take my chair and sit over there, waiting for someone to ask me to leave, you know?
“There was no written rule that I had to leave. So then you say to the annoying guy, No, I’m here, I’m part of this team too, I want to learn.
“So this Stella guy, I stayed there, and I stayed, so we became friends.”
Barrichello went on to explain that he can now see the experience of working with Schumacher bleeding into how he leads McLaren as team principal.
The team principal’s importance to Schumacher’s success at Ferrari only highlights what an incredible asset he is to McLaren now.
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How Andrea Stella has replicated Michael Schumacher’s success at Ferrari during his time at McLaren
Schumacher created the last Ferrari dynasty in Formula 1 in the early 2000s, and it was only McLaren’s poor management of the 2007 campaign that handed the Scuderia their most recent title in 2007 thanks to Kimi Raikkonen.
Something that Schumacher’s Ferrari and Stella’s McLaren have in common is building the team around a few trusted individuals.
Schumacher was keen for Ferrari to stick with Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne despite a slow start to their time together and it immediately paid off.
Stella has done something very similar at McLaren, bringing in Rob Marshall and putting more faith in Peter Prodromou behind the scenes.
While Stella would like to replicate Schumacher’s testing schedule ahead of next year’s regulation changes, he’ll be confident that the team he’s created around him will put McLaren in the strongest position possible to tackle 2026 and beyond.
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