Stella: My role is to serve and represent the team

Stella took over the hot seat at McLaren in December of 2022 after Andreas Seidl jumped ship to Sauber to lead the team's morphing into Audi's F1 Works team by 2026.

At the time, and with McLaren's dire situation - they had started the ground-effect era in 2022 in horrible fashion - getting a promotion into Team Principal was not something one could really celebrate, but Stella kept his head down, focused on the job, not on talking.

In 2023, McLaren started to show signs of recovery with their Austrian GP upgrade catapulting them from the midfield to Red Bull's closet challengers, and during all that time, Stella kept a low profile, focusing on the job.

It wasn't until recently that he made some bold claims that McLaren can challenge for wins in 2024, despite not having the best of season starts - given how they finished 2023.

What made Stella's claims bold was the fact that their 2024 shaky start was combined with a recent technical shakeup that saw David Sanchez leave to Alpine, but their performance in the Miami Grand Prix validated what the Italian said.

It was an up and down weekend for the Woking squad, as they did not maximize their Sprint Qualifying, Sprint, and even Qualifying on Saturday afternoon, but they nailed the race and with a little help from the Safety Car, Norris took his maiden F1 win.

Facing the media in Miami, Stella was asked how it felt to be a winning team boss, he said with humility: "For me, a victory as team principal is just like the victory of the team. My role is to serve the team and represent the team.

"So what you see now in one person, is 850 people. That's where my thoughts, my heart and my mind goes because I know what type of work we are putting together, pulling off, to turn the situation around from 15 months ago, and the quality, because all teams will be pushing 100%," he explained further.

"So it is a combination of the efforts, the quality and quantity, and this is the element I like the most, just the quality of the engineers, the technical people, the operators and mechanics and everyone.

"We call it total competition, it is such a huge, wide effort you have to put together and as a team principal, that's what I have in front of me in this moment," he insisted.

It's an understandable sentiment from Stella who progressed up through the ranks at McLaren whom he joined back in 2015 as Head of Race Operations following Fernando Alonso from Ferrari where he was his race engineer - a bold step for an Italian to leave the only Italian F1 team, especially when that team is the Scuderia.

That meant Stella spent time with the troops in the trenches and knows that hard work that is being put to bring two F1 cars on track race in race out - the mark of a true leader.

While Oscar Piastri's F1 Sprint win in Qatar in 2023 happened under Stella's watch, Miami was the first time he won a "real grand prix" as McLaren's team boss, and it coincided with the maiden win of the driver they consider the team's star and future - Norris.

Quizzed whether the Briton's win took the pressure of his shoulders, Stella responded: "Realistically, I think it was a bit of a weight on his shoulders, but it was a weight on our shoulders as well because we knew as soon as we made winning material available to Lando, he would have delivered.

"So we felt the responsibility and I have said that many times, that it is up to us, it is not up to Lando. But credit to Lando, he kept developing. We had a talk in the media about how he developed over the winter, especially looking at improving in qualifying and delivering laps that sometimes don't have to be 100% when you have a fast car, just be there.

"I think he is doing that," the McLaren boss pointed out. "I also have to say that his race management is very mature. As soon as he saw there wasn't much to do after the first lap, he started to save his tyres because he knew his race would come at some stage. The pace he was able to pull off when the cars ahead of him pitted, that was quite incredible.

"Fast in qualifying, even sometimes pacing himself, and then very mature in the race in terms of getting the most out of the material he has," Stella concluded.