McLaren F1 boss admits turning down job after Zak Brown's surprising revelation

Andrea Stella has confirmed his reasoning for rejecting the McLaren team principal job in 2019 after CEO Zak Brown revealed that he had offered the Italian engineer the role before appointing Andreas Seidl, but that he had turned it down.

Stella has been working with McLaren since 2015, when he joined from Ferrari after serving as race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso. Since then, he has ascended the ranks at Woking, holding roles such as head of race operations, performance director, and racing director before becoming team principal.

Under Stella's leadership, McLaren have thrived, clinching back-to-back Constructors' Championship titles, registering 19 race victories and 60 podium finishes, and staking a claim for this year's Drivers' Championship crown with both drivers.

The 54-year-old didn't always feel ready for life as a team principal, though. "Truth be known, I offered it to him the first time around [in January 2019], and he declined it," Brown told BBC Sport. "He felt he wasn't ready.

"Andrea is someone who knows his capabilities and doesn't overreach. The second time around, he knew me better, knew the team better, even though he'd been here a while. And still he didn't say yes in the first phone call. It took a couple of days because he's very methodical, very thoughtful."

Explaining his reasoning on the latest episode of the Beyond the Grid podcast, Stella said: "In 2018, I think my focus, based on the conversation I had with McLaren, should have been diverted to the technical aspect, and the small things, the performance difficulties that we were having.

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"In fact, at the time, I became performance director, and I think we needed to stay focused, relatively limited in the area of influence, because there was a significant amount of insight that I needed to gain. When you are a team principal, necessarily you need to navigate at a slightly higher level, less detailed.

"At the time, we were in such a negative spiral that we needed to go into every level of detail to understand why a talented group of people is not in condition to perform. I felt at the time that was the right role for me. I'm not kind of a career-led person; I'm more like what's needed for the business. I know I'm going to get passionate about what I do anyhow."

With four races remaining in 2025, it remains to be seen whether McLaren will crown their first world champion since Lewis Hamilton in 2007. Lando Norris leads team-mate Oscar Piastri by one point as things stand, while Max Verstappen is 36 points behind in third.