Zak Brown insists Andrea Stella remains McLaren ‘glue’ amid GianPiero Lambiase arrival

GianPiero Lambiase will join McLaren’s racing operations side of the Formula 1 team, but no matter how it plays out when he arrives, Andrea Stella will remain the “glue” that brings it all together.

This is according to McLaren CEO Zak Brown, who weighed in on speculation that Lambiase, who will join the team no later than 2028, will actually replace Stella as McLaren’s team principal.

Andrea Stella backed as McLaren leader despite GianPiero Lambiase signing

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McLaren announced the signing of the highly respected Lambiase earlier this month after almost a decade as Verstappen’s race engineer.

Ahead of the official announcement, Formula 1’s rumour mill claimed Lambiase had been lined up as a potential successor to Stella as team principal amid rumours that the Italian would return to Ferrari.

Stella spent more than a decade at Ferrari from 2000, winning world championship titles with Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen while also being the race engineer to Fernando Alonso.

PlanetF1.com, though, reported on the day of Lambiase’s signing that Stella’s role remains unchanged and that he is not set for a return to Ferrari.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown confirmed this, saying: “Happy to share that GianPiero Lambiase will join the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team as Chief Racing Officer, reporting into Team Principal Andrea Stella, when his contract ends no later than 2028.

“He joins an incredible team under Andrea’s leadership and I’m excited about what we can achieve together.”

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But that doesn’t mean McLaren doesn’t have an eye on the future and the growth potential of whose within the team – and those joining the team.

“Very excited to have GP join us,” Brown told PlanetF1.com and other invited media.

“I think my job as CEO is to make sure that we have stability and visibility to the future. I think we’ve got a lot of talented individuals that have room for growth.

“He [GP] will be on the racing operations side. Andrea, in reality, kind of has three jobs. I think we sometimes talk about he has two, he actually has three.

“He’s the team principal. He runs the racing team, and he also plays a big role in kind of a technical director capacity. But, you know, Andrea is kind of the glue that brings that together.

“And I think much as the team principal role has evolved over the years, now you’re seeing most teams with the CEO and team principal. Now you’re seeing the team principal role evolve.

“And these teams are so big that if you’re going to be great in all those roles, I think Andrea is very capable of doing two jobs, asking him to do three jobs is a tall order.

“So I think GP will come in and play a great role there and then my job is always to be looking down the road as to who can play and grow within the sport. And so certainly, given GP’s experience and his age, he’s someone I think that can be here for a long time at McLaren and grow.”

Brown, who joined McLaren Racing in 2016 and became CEO in April 2018, also talked up the team’s change of culture since his arrival.

As someone who heavily criticised Red Bull’s “toxic” environment and blamed it for personnel leaving, Brown says McLaren – while not without politics – has become a friendlier and more inclusive environment to work in since he joined.

“People and culture by a country mile, That’s the easiest question to answer,” he said of the changes within the Woking team.

“I think about my first day joining, it was a dark environment, and that was literally from, literally, the paint on the race car being black and dark gray to the walls. So you know that you could feel it was a cold environment. It wasn’t a happy environment.

“Our partners weren’t happy, our drivers weren’t happy, or majority of our race team wasn’t happy. A lot of conspiracy theories running around.

“So I think we’re a much more vibrant team. There was a huge amount of talent in here, it was just about unlocking it, providing motivation, excitement, bringing some fun back. We race cars for a living, so it’s more fun winning than losing, but at the end of the day, it’s a pretty fun job.

“So getting everyone in a teamwork environment and the culture that all of the people in the leadership team, obviously, Andrea is the one that’s most visible to all of you. But you know, my head of people and talent, my CFO or commercial department comms, they’ve all done a wonderful job in their respective departments.

“I think when I joined, there was an us in them, upstairs, downstairs, racing team, commercial department. Now it’s exciting to see when we do something like a weight-saving exercise, and you start having to kind of modify the vinyl on your race car, as small as that may seem.

“The commercial department gets excited about feeling like they’re contributing to the solution to make the race car faster. So when we went on Sunday, the finance department knows they had a big role in that, etc.

“So when you can get 1400 people, not all of those are on Formula One, but the predominant amount, rowing the same direction and all understanding how important their role is to our on-track success, it creates an awesome environment we have.

“Wouldn’t want to be as naive as to say we have no politics in here, but I’d say we have very little.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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