The sudden outbreak of a December ‘silly season’ for team principals left four Formula 1 outfits scrambling to find replacements. McLaren were the quickest to name their new leader, immediately replacing the departing Andreas Seidl with Andrea Stella.
Their job was made easier by the fact Stella already occupied one of their most senior roles: executive director of racing. In that position he was one of three members of the management team, reporting to on-site leaders of CEO Zak Brown and Seidl.
Brown confirmed Stella’s experience with McLaren and another of F1’s top teams made him the number one candidate to replace Seidl.
“Andrea obviously has a wealth of experience, not only with McLaren, but a rich history with Ferrari,” he told media including RaceFans today.
“So he’s someone that, we knew, knew the team inside out, is a very hands-on person in the racing team [It] was of high interest to me and the shareholders to have someone leading the team that gets their hands dirty, so to speak.”
Stella is moving into a leadership role for the first time with his promotion to team principal, but he’s already got a vast amount of experience in F1 and taken on jobs with cross-company responsibilities since graduating from Sapienza University of Rome with a degree in Aerospace Engineering over 22 years ago.
He stayed in his home country for his first taste of F1 work, joining Ferrari’s test team in 2000 as a performance engineer. Having impressed with the test team, come 2002 he was given that same role on race weekends and worked on Mick Schumacher’s car for five seasons.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
When Schumacher left the team at the end of 2006 he was replaced by Kimi Raikkonen. Stella became his performance engineer and was promoted to the role of race engineer to Raikkonen in 2009. He continued in that role with his successor Fernando Alonso, who he accompanied to McLaren in 2015.
McLaren signed Stella to be their head of race operations, and promoted him to be performance director in 2018. At the end of the 2019 season he was moved into a new position which he held until Seidl’s departure.
Stella admitted he had “been reluctant” to take on a more public-facing role at McLaren “so it needed a bit of thought” to accept the promotion to team principal. Brown said he will “lean in more” to…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at RaceFans…