Lando Norris was just a few days old when McLaren last won the Formula 1 Constructors’ Championship with the help of Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard in 1998. Oscar Piastri hadn’t been born yet. Twenty-six years later, however, the duo in papaya overalls and the resilient crew behind them upstaged the likes of Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari to clinch the 2024 F1 constructors’ title Sunday at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
It wasn’t long ago that advertising space was abundant on McLaren’s F1 cars because there weren’t many sponsors onboard, and the company had to sell most of its assets—including the Technology Centre—to get the funding it needed to stay afloat. When Zak Brown joined McLaren Racing as CEO in 2016, things were in dire need of restructuring. Its driver lineup consisted of Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button—two world champions that, while extremely skilled, didn’t fit Brown’s long-term vision. The next couple of years saw a switch from Honda to Renault engines, while Stoffel Vandoorne was brought in to partner Alonso. The Belgian driver’s stint went so well that I had completely forgotten it even happened.
After some trial and error, Brown lured two drivers that would revitalize McLaren—and in hindsight, prime the team for another constructors’ trophy a few years later. In 2019, Norris and Carlos Sainz joined the team, bringing mostly fresh faces to F1 but also an energy that their title-winning predecessors simply couldn’t muster up. That year McLaren finished fourth in the constructor standings, behind Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull. And just when it seemed like things were getting better, the 2020 pandemic brought McLaren dangerously close to shutting down for good.
Eventually, Sainz left for Ferrari and another big name was brought in to lead the team to more prosperous years, while also serving as a role model for Norris. Daniel Ricciardo settled quickly into the team and truly believed he’d go out there and show everyone how it’s done. The reality was unfortunately much different. In 2021, Ricciardo finished eighth in the championship while Norris finished sixth, and it was a similar story in 2022 when they finished seventh and eleventh, respectively. At the end of 2022, Ricciardo was shown the door along with a handsome payout, and McLaren won a comical legal battle to hire the services of up-and-comer Oscar Piastri for the 2023 season.
The effort required to line up the right personnel for a championship-winning team across all those seasons cannot be overstated. Remember, it’s not just about the drivers, but the right people at the factory, the right team principal, the right partners and sponsors, and even the right tire changers. Every individual counts. And finally, with two young guns behind the wheel, McLaren started 2023 hoping to become a leading team once again. They came relatively close that year, finishing fourth in the constructors’ championship while Norris and Piastri secured sixth and ninth on the drivers’ table.
But 2024 was meant to be McLaren’s year, and everything that’d happened since 1998 led them right up to this moment. More specifically, every decision Brown has taken since 2016 was made to win the constructors’ championship and get the biggest slice of the FIA’s prize money.
“Andrea Stella, he’s done such a good job of leading this team,” Brown told F1.com. “He’s just an unbelievable leader, he leads by example, he empowers people, he’s very technical and he pushes everyone to get the best out of them and that’s what you saw tonight.
“I mean, Lando drove brilliantly, unfortunate what happened to Oscar at the start, but the team was flawless. They executed the pit stop great and I think I was the only one who was ready to have a heart attack for two hours. That race, [Norris] carried us. To not make any mistakes, we were worried about safety cars, I was worried about everything. But he drove flawlessly.”
There’s no bigger confidence and morale boost in F1 than winning the first or last race of the season. These help you start the year empowered and ready for the new challenge, or send you home confident that you were at the top of the food chain when the doors closed for the winter. Furthermore, it sends your rivals home feeling like they’re a step behind you, and now they’ll have to endure a couple of months of feeling bad about themselves.
We’ll have to wait until March to see if McLaren shows up in Australia with a dominant car, but what we do know is that Norris and Piastri must be taken seriously. Neither will rest until they win titles of their own.
“Next [we’ll] try and repeat the constructors’ and get the drivers’, I’ll let Oscar and Lando figure that one out,” added Brown.
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