McLaren is ready to race at the Red Bull Ring, the track where its rise began two years ago, leading it to become the current benchmark team in Formula 1. That fourth-place finish gave reason for hope, but the growth over the following 24 months was exponential.
Canadian Grand Prix 2023. Oscar Piastri finishes the race in eleventh place, three spots ahead of Lando Norris. After the first eight races of the season, McLaren sits sixth in the Constructors’ Championship with 17 points. The MCL60 that the team started the season with was born under a cloud, as the team had already been working for some time on a heavily updated version that would be ready (in a single unit, assigned to Norris) for the following Austrian Grand Prix. Expectations were high, but no one could have predicted that the B-spec MCL60 would mark the beginning of a remarkable technical rise. Two years after that debut, McLaren is indisputably the technical reference point for the entire Formula 1 grid.
The work that began in the winter of 2022 and continued into the spring of 2023 was clearly inspired by Red Bull, with significant design choices based on the dominant RB19’s technical philosophy. McLaren failed to win a Grand Prix; its only success came with Piastri in the Doha sprint race. But the shift in performance was evident in the numbers. Over the final 14 race weekends of the 2023 calendar, Red Bull scored 539 points, with McLaren second at 285. A clear signal of what was about to unfold. Woking’s 2024 campaign, however, has not been a straight path. The start of the season was again an uphill battle: after the first five races, Red Bull led the Constructors’ standings with 195 points, followed by Ferrari (151) and McLaren (96), with a 99-point gap to the top.
The ‘real’ McLaren emerges in Miami 2024
To recover from a difficult situation, twelve months earlier McLaren had drawn heavily on the ideas of its rivals; a year later, the team began a new chapter shaped by the experience of the previous season. At the Miami Grand Prix, another crucial step in McLaren’s journey to the top of Formula 1 took place: another B-spec car, the MCL38, a project developed in the new wind tunnel built at the Woking headquarters. Floor, wings, sidepods, suspension, and air intakes—everything was redesigned, both to address previous weaknesses and to push certain concepts to the extreme.
On Sunday in Miami came the victory, the first for Norris and also for many within the McLaren team, ending a drought that had lasted since Jenson Button’s win at the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix and interrupted only by Daniel Ricciardo’s 2021 Monza win following the Hamilton-Verstappen collision. But the Miami victory was different—it rested on solid foundations, and everything suggested (as would later be confirmed) that it would be the first in a long string of successes. “We had the feeling that something important was coming,” Andrea Stella remarked on the evening of the Miami race. “We had encouraging data, but more than anything, walking around the factory and talking to people, I kept thinking: these guys know what they’re doing, they know the business. Everything took shape within a year. We felt the wave coming, but we needed the confirmation on track.”
An anniversary at Red Bull’s home
The wave Stella foresaw brought five wins in the last fourteen races of the previous year, a shift in pace confirmed by the capture of the Constructors’ Championship title. That was followed by a strong hold on both 2025 championships, with seven wins in the first ten races. Everyone in the paddock clearly remembers the beginning of the papaya cycle, when the only upgraded car McLaren managed to complete arrived at the Spielberg circuit in a race against time.
At the height of the Red Bull era, no one could have imagined that car would become the foundation for a dramatic shift in Formula 1’s technical order. The task seemed impossible: to catch up to and surpass the team that was on its way to winning 21 out of 22 races, asserting the most absolute dominance in the sport’s history. Experts had already penciled in Max Verstappen and Red Bull as champions for 2024 and 2025. Without regulatory changes, the Milton Keynes squad was considered unbeatable.
Two years later, right on Red Bull’s home track, the anniversary is celebrated of the moment that started the journey leading to a shift in power. Verstappen, at his peak, managed to stay on the throne, but Red Bull has stepped down. Formula 1 moves so quickly that even events from just twenty-four months ago now feel like distant history—back when Norris and McLaren happily welcomed a fourth place, then their best result of the season. Hugs, pats on the back, and Stella’s comment on Sunday evening: “This is a result that gives us hope.”
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