Andrea Stella: Only work gives you self-confidence

Andrea Stella has been with McLaren since 2015 and in December 2022 he became the head of this team, and under him the team made impressive progress.

McLaren drivers have already finished on the podium five times this season, including Lando Norris winning the Miami Grand Prix and Oscar Piastri finishing second in Monaco.

As soon as Stella took office, she immediately began intensive reforms of the team’s technical department, and the confidence with which she appears in 2024 can be considered a confirmation of the correctness of his approach. Although at the same time the Italian engineer tries to estimate the course of the season as realistically as possible, which he spoke about in an interview with Speedcafe.

“I’m not sure about anything, and this is not a joke,” Stella emphasized. “I just know that if we want to stay at this level and repeat these performances, we have to increase the efficiency of the machine. We all need the projects we do to work.

Leaders should give people simple and clear tasks, and they should have what they need to complete those tasks. This is the only thing I know for sure. There is something else, but I don’t want to give away our approach to this issue.”

The first half of last season was not the best for McLaren and that was because the MCL60 car was clearly slower than the team had hoped. But there was no panic, Stella and his subordinates worked calmly, identified the weak points of the chassis, tried to eliminate them and in the middle of the year presented a series of technical innovations that allowed immediate improvement: in Austria, Norris finished 4th, and in Hungary achieved he took 2nd place.

After eight rounds of the 2024 championship, McLaren is firmly in third place in the Constructors’ Championship and has already scored almost twice as many points as Mercedes.

“…What is trust? This is a psychological phenomenon. Only work gives you self-confidence,” Stella continued. “When I worked with several champions in the past (during his time at Ferrari he worked with Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso), they did not turn to psychologists to gain trust. They gained confidence as they worked.

Their confidence was based on the understanding that none of their competitors worked as hard as they did. And gradually this confidence grew.

So personally, I’m not sure about anything. All I know is that we have to find the right path forward, stick to it and believe that we will succeed, without losing focus.”